It’s not unique. Charle Dickens wrote about it. We don’t like to admit it. We have a dependency on bureaucracy. Our complex society runs on it.
Whatever we do when it comes to the meeting of an individual with an organisation, it’s inevitable. Irrational people deny this fact or say it’s only true of public bodies, like government departments. It’s as if the generally high performance of modern computer systems renders them completely invisible.
One apt illustration of a dependency on systematic bureaucracy and digitisation combined can be read in a carefully constructed e-mail from the CEO of Sainsbury’s this weekend.
“I’m writing to update you on the technical issue that has affected our Groceries Online deliveries and some services in our stores this weekend.”
This could have come from any large complex organisation that exists in today’s digital world. When outages happen, we all sit patiently for affected systems to come back online with the full services that we normally take for granted. A sudden reversion to traditional cash transactions was a shock to the average post-COVID consumer.
This weekend my experience of one major hotel chain was that they would not accept cash at all in their restaurant. My “paper” money was useless. It sat in my pocket.
What we have is the power of utility. Systems become so good that we build ever more dependency into them doing the right thing, every time. The problem is that systems are often programmed to do certain tasks exceptionally well but as soon as there’s an unexpected deviation outside normal parameters the situation does not go well.
An illustration of that experience can be read in the public version of the interim report on UK NATS[1]. After the event, and similar unfortunate events, there’s a cavalcade of calls for more contingency, more resilience, more planning, more training, more checking and so on.
That list is perfectly sensible. But wouldn’t it have been better if those actions had been taken up-front? I often saw this discovery in my time doing systems certification audits. Companies who spend a lot of money upfront to build software that was well characterised and tested were not guaranteed success, but their chances were greatly improved. Those who hit the road with over-confidence, marketing hype and rigorous cost cutting had a high probability of negative outcomes. It’s not a simple cause and effect but good system architecture, robust software and a management that understood the need to spend time and money judiciously do well.
Just think. If a runner ran a marathon without a strategy, training, basic fitness, planning and sound motivation no one would expect them to be winning anything unless they were exceptionally lucky or unbelievably talented. Not many in the latter category.
There’s a lesson here. It’s been copied over and over. Saddy the almost completely invisibly of complex system that work well in everyday life means we soon take them for granted. And the result is?
John Vincent 