To me bureaucracy is more about it being someone’s job to follow the rules and make sure they really are followed. And then you have someone else who makes sure the rules cover every option. And as you may have experienced, there are always cases that don’t fit the rules perfectly, so the bureaucracy keeps getting more complex. It is a rabbit hole, unless you deliberately step in and simplify the rules regularly.
I’ve always seen bureaucracies as process design for people that are bad at process design.
I work in a very compliance heavy environment, and we run an “agile” team that ships as often as 10 times a day. We have easy audits and no compliance issues because we invested in good process design. A company we’re quite close with has the same compliance requirements, and their shipping process involves printing, signing, scanning and filing excel sheets. It’s not like we’re vastly better at our jobs than they are, we just designed far better processes.
Can you indicate what industry ? Or even what level of process (if it's just auto checking we have filled in the right sections on form 1, or more complex?)
First and foremost, if you go full Taylorism, you're supposed to verify the results of adding and keeping any given rule in a scientific way. Defect rates, delays, costs, adherence rates, and regularly sample what happens when you remove a rule if it has costs (they almost always do).
Company bureaucracies skip this part as matter of course. Often the adherence parts or existence of workarounds.
I think of bureaucracies similarly to software. I've seen many legacy code bases that started out simple but as they add features and identify more and more edge cases programmers start adding abstractions and config files and processes and it becomes increasingly complex and difficult to modify and nobody fully comprehends the whole system or how to fix it. I imagine it's the same thing with organizational processes.
The bureaucracy in codebases often mirrors the same of the company in which they were developed, or in some cases the general culture of the programming language itself (prominent examples being Java and C#.) The most horrifically indirect code I've seen comes from large enterprise software, where something that is actually quite simple takes inordinate amounts of code to accomplish; on the other hand, code written by and maintained by only one or two individuals rarely accumulates such accidental complexity.
Isn’t the answer that we are moving towards decentralised / self sovereign platforms with more creative ways to transfer value that naturally evolve the right economics?
The irony is that bitcoin, the pioneer, confirms your hypothesis because it relies on a form of intentional waste (POW) to disincentivise bad behaviour. PoW is the new bureaucracy.
I do think we will find better ways, and decentralisation is the natural outcome.
I emphatically do not think that decentralization is the natural outcome, nor that it's optimal.
On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, Meditations on Moloch [1]. The meat of it is this:
> …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.
If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal.
Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, which means being a slave to everyone else.
But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle.
My interpretation is that actually that is part of the idea. If you want to change the game, if you want to make a new game, then that is strong coordination.
Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally. A top-down authoritarian doesn't get his powers from a deity; there was a coordinated effort of a decentralized group of people to get him there and sustain him. He, or whoever pushed to get him in charge, was that anyone trying to improve the situation. No reason the same mechanism can't act to make other changes to the status quo.
> Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally.
This isn't true at all. The fact that the efficient market hypothesis doesn't seem to hold is already the proof of that, and the same reasoning applies to other social behaviors [4].
Furthermore, many, many, many, many studies in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (and related fields) [1] have shed light on the bounded rationality of human actors in decision making. Game-theoretically optimal decisions is a specific, well-defined thing that's different from making decisions based on the affects and biases of the preconscious and unconscious. You can't just tautologically define "game-theoretically optimal" to be whatever decision someone ends up making.
What does this mean? The direct implication is that it's neither game-theoretically optimal nor inevitable for stateless humans to enter into a social contract that eventually cements itself into a state apparatus.
A top-down authoritarian doesn't get their powers from a deity, yes, but it wasn't quite explicit coordination either. To demonstrate using a brief example, one of the models of the evolutionary stages of the social contract [2][3] is that states were a natural conclusion of tribal societies, which were themselves a natural conclusion of lineal societies, i.e. families. Lineal societies most likely weren't formed through explicit consent, i.e. early stateless infants probably didn't explicitly decide to enter into a social contract. There's basically no particular a priori reason why families exist (for example, the Ik people in Uganda seem to have no or a very weak concept of using familial relations for survival, even to protect their young), and very likely that this evolution was just the model happened to win out due to random noise in history rather than actual optimality.
Again I would like to stress how much the current societal configuration is mostly just noise instead of signal.
Your style of argumentation is peculiar; you are criticizing the decentralized outcome because "if everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated."
Yet now you write that everyone acting game-theoretically optimally is not actually possible.
So you were criticizing an impossible scenario?
Since I agree with you that literally everyone acting game-theoretically optimally is impossible, I took your earlier use of the concept to mean something possible, that is, everyone acting as close to game-theoretically optimally as they are capable, and used the concept in the same way.
It doesn't contradict what I previously said. The ability of actors to act game-theoretically depends on the bounds of the rationality and the complexity of the scenario. A game of chicken is much simpler than a game of chess, which in turn is much simpler than capitalism.
The multipolar trap manifests itself in real life in lots of simple ways already. The original essay has some examples, but the tragedy of the commons is the quintessential example.
The multipolar trap as a totalizing behavior is not an impossible scenario, but just currently infeasible for most sufficiently complex scenarios given the bounded reality. Which means it becomes a cause for concern as the bounds on rationality increase (through computation, through organization, etc.). That's why we should be wary of decentralized systems in the long run.
What you said was "everyone" was always acting game-theoretically already and therefore that what we currently have is game-theoretically optimal, which is what I disagreed with.
As the manager of an IT organization, I explicitly use delay as a way to measure need. I usually sit on a purchase request until the requestor (sometime later) asks me, "Hey, what's up with that convenient but not essential thing I ordered last week?" Once I know they really need it enough to ask twice I will consider approving it.
I'll do this with support, if I respond too quickly then the issue becomes a conversation and the customer will become lazy. Adding a little delay forces them to think for themselves a bit more.
Some of them would call or email me with some really important, not previously discussed thing that they absolutely needed to have (but really didn't). Where in the past I'd immediately take this request seriously and discuss how many hours/days of work this would reasonably take, I now often give them an unusually high indication at first. If the conversation continues and it becomes clear that they really do want/need said feature, I'll come up with a more realistic indication.
And then there are two reasons and you failed to discern which it is. Either:
1) thing is not essential, you saved the cost
2) a workaround that is inconvenient or costly exists, compare costs
3) you just caused an opportunity cost
In other words, you're breaking the process. Unless you're a process engineer and track both causes and results diligently you should not do that. Ever.
Excellent analysis! I would modify #2 slightly, as a workaround might also be convenient and cheap.
Obviously one should use common sense to avoid adverse outcomes. Inexpensive productivity tools get approved more quickly, whereas upgrades to perfectly fine but previous generation laptops may take a week or so :-).
When you say "explicitly", do you mean you announce to the whole organization that this is your process? That in order for them to have something delivered they are required to request it twice? Are you actually telling people upfront that their first request will be effectively ignored? Or do you mean that you tell the org there's one version of the process but you are clear with yourself (and/or perhaps, your superiors) that you will actually carry out a second, undisclosed process.
Perhaps you're not filtering out requests on the basis of need, but on the ability of some individuals over others to figure out the unwritten rules and choose to play your game.
"Intentionally" would have been a better choice of word than "explicitly," as I use delay as a decision-making tactic rather than an official, published policy.
Yes, it is possible that people are gaming my tactic and I am optimizing for the wrong variable, but in practice that doesn't seem to happen.
The author's musings about this are good fun but they struggle to make a coherent point that delivers deep insight. In this post, he considers the points that commenters raised and tiptoes around the possibility that maybe some bureaucratic rituals are a filter to screen the petitioners by desperation, but he doesn't talk about the possibility that such structures may have evolved incrementally to optimize for maximum ass-covering and the implications thereof. To him, efficiency (of filtering customers) is a sufficient explanation, which is odd considering his complaints about bureaucracy's inefficiencies before and after.
So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV. For being the primary identity providers of the US populace, the DMVs of US states are actually rather remarkable. I guess the seemingly arbitrary progression of ticket numbers in cavernous waiting rooms is valid annoyance, but watermarked cards being mailed out to thousands of people just a few business days after collecting their info is pretty good, and then there's more vehicles than that.
Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, but it's worth applying the "I could've built that" test for them the same way it's trendy to critique valuable companies that are "just a chat app". If you had to credential 35 million people and 39 million vehicles a year, how would you do it? Would you codify a few things, and hire rockstars who can think on their feet? How soon would you start making rules about the blatantness of invalid forms, or unpaid fees, or how many people would you have to catch selling favors before you re-examine the process?
Deep bureaucracies are often the emergent result when your process has been burned by costly customers (in time, money, effort) or rogue employees (corruption, graft, espionage) too many times. They are systems where each and every decision maker can always defer to the Process as an explanation for why someone can't have something and the Process is sacred because "it's always been that way", even if it changes, and where each and every fulfiller is powerless to truly make a meaningful exception, except when that feature was already built in.
> The author's musings ... struggle to make a coherent point...
> So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV
Maybe read it again? The author raises a coherent hypothesis, then questions it as a widely explanatory principle, using the DMV explicitly and intentionally as an example of bureaucratic inefficiency that it describes poorly.
An explanation may be true and useful (better than no explanation) even if it is only applicable to some cases. A given case of bureaucracy may have one or even many among multiple potential causes, inducing (for the requester) latency or cost in order to "separate out the needy from the greedy" being one, the various benefits a manager gains by over-staffing being another (DMV?)...
Time and exasperation people are willing to put up with in order to get what they want is a form of co-payment. Part of it is paid for by the insured (as a "proof of real need"), another part being the bureaucracy which is paid by all insured people. Any insured may prefer to wait (than to occupy the bureaucracy by filling useless forms...) because it is far cheaper (no work for him nor for the bureaucracy), but this is rarely possible because there are urgent cases, and also because it seems more frustrating.
Author makes the inadvertent case for insurance companies to buy pharmaceutical companies. The marginal cost of production of any medication is virtually nil, the costs are nearly entirely due to R&D. If the treatment costs the insurance company $10,000 then the insurance company has an incentive to provide poor service, but if the treatment costs the insurance company pennies, then there is no need for such bureaucracy to incentivize patients to choose cheaper drugs. Indeed, purchasing the pharmaceutical companies would allow insurance companies to cut out unnecessary levels of administration and their associated costs, thus boosting profits.
"Orgs have an incentive not to respond yes to every request they get" - not true. Orgs have an incentive to reduce the cost of saying yes, but saying yes is an important part of providing good customer service, keeping repeat business, and building a brand that enables bigger growth. Orgs that lose sight of this, deserve to be eaten by their competitors.
Nothing about vertical integration of those two industries would solve that problem. Paying out millions to billions to own drugs isn't going to make their unit economics any better. The $10,000 drug isn't going to magically only cost $100 just because it got bought by an insurance company. In fact it'll probably cost more, because the transaction costs involved in buying the drug will have to get added onto the R&D cost of developing the drug, which is the reason it costs $10,000 in the first place.
It's also wrong to assume that just because a company gets acquired, that there's going to be 'unnecessary levels of administration and other associated costs' that are just begging for the ax. Pharma companies have finance people too that can provide that kind of oversight and recommendations.
The market for drugs is complicated by two factors. First is that people who need drugs generally can't get that need met by any other product / service. So there's an incentive for price creep. Second is the patent system which forces companies to grab as much cash as they can until the patent expires.
If longer patents were granted, or the patent system were more sane in that the patent period doesn't begin until after the drug is able to be made available to the market, then the costs of developing drugs would be a lot more legible, and therefore amortizable.
There's no reason to assume that the drug division of the combined firm will continue to develop new drugs. In this imagining, they only need to continue to manufacture the drugs they've already developed.
Also are you seriously arguing here for longer patent terms? You think that will get new products to market more quickly?
I don't really understand the author's (and some of the commenters') assumption that making a bureaucracy unpleasant and inefficient is a deliberate decision.
Certainly, once a bureaucracy got to that point, it might have certain benefits, but I don't see how that implies there was a conscious strategy before.
Unbelievably, the medication example the author uses is a system I have direct experience with. It is a group whose job it is to make the decision of whether insurance covers a drug that a doctor has prescribed.
The triage is more sophisticated than a queue management ritual, but also has elements of it in it.
Some insurer programs require that the patient be declined by another one before paying for the prescription, so the doctors fill out hopeless requests because they need the rejection letter to achieve their outcome. This fills the decision queues, and everyone experiences the lag. Consider doctors handwriting as a next order CV problem, and then think about the attitude of the user demographic who doesn't feel obligated to be clear about their intentions - now design a digital product for them.
Bureaucracy in real life is a kind of cluster-governance, where nobody serves each other, and everyone presumes everyone else is coming to them to be regulated. Further, they really do think their job is to avoid obligations to others unless they are somehow mandated to have one.
I can say that agile development methods are disrupting bureaucracy in a big way. You don't see it, but every online license renewal and filing system wipes out layers of bureaucracy. The systems take years to develop because the personal/business relationships that made those systems work need to be identified and unraveled before you implement them in code. I would argue you don't understand stakeholder management unless you have spent time in a bureaucracy, and the people who do succeed at it in the private sector often do so as the result of both luck and negative anti-patterns.
I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary.
Tech is an expression of how its users want to relate, and in this way it's culture. When we impose tech on institutions, it realigns them to organize around the relational patterns in the tech.
Bureaucracy is an active ingredient, and the tech we develop changes it. Want a better DMV? Build one.
Short version is it moved the power base and budget approvals into IT governance, and corporate security touches everything.
It created the abstractions of clients and services and put enterprise architecture in the middle. All projects became IT projects.
Today, the clash of iterative methods that provide makers with almost total autonomy vs. waterfall PM oversight and governance is the key friction point in large institutions, imho.
44 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 85.4 ms ] threadI work in a very compliance heavy environment, and we run an “agile” team that ships as often as 10 times a day. We have easy audits and no compliance issues because we invested in good process design. A company we’re quite close with has the same compliance requirements, and their shipping process involves printing, signing, scanning and filing excel sheets. It’s not like we’re vastly better at our jobs than they are, we just designed far better processes.
Company bureaucracies skip this part as matter of course. Often the adherence parts or existence of workarounds.
The irony is that bitcoin, the pioneer, confirms your hypothesis because it relies on a form of intentional waste (POW) to disincentivise bad behaviour. PoW is the new bureaucracy.
I do think we will find better ways, and decentralisation is the natural outcome.
On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, Meditations on Moloch [1]. The meat of it is this:
> …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.
If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal.
Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, which means being a slave to everyone else.
But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
My thought here is that improving situation doesn't have to happen in the game. One can step out of the game and offer a new one.
I.e. the quoted judgement about decentralised systems is not as grave if you don't look at them as closed systems.
This isn't true at all. The fact that the efficient market hypothesis doesn't seem to hold is already the proof of that, and the same reasoning applies to other social behaviors [4].
Furthermore, many, many, many, many studies in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (and related fields) [1] have shed light on the bounded rationality of human actors in decision making. Game-theoretically optimal decisions is a specific, well-defined thing that's different from making decisions based on the affects and biases of the preconscious and unconscious. You can't just tautologically define "game-theoretically optimal" to be whatever decision someone ends up making.
What does this mean? The direct implication is that it's neither game-theoretically optimal nor inevitable for stateless humans to enter into a social contract that eventually cements itself into a state apparatus.
A top-down authoritarian doesn't get their powers from a deity, yes, but it wasn't quite explicit coordination either. To demonstrate using a brief example, one of the models of the evolutionary stages of the social contract [2][3] is that states were a natural conclusion of tribal societies, which were themselves a natural conclusion of lineal societies, i.e. families. Lineal societies most likely weren't formed through explicit consent, i.e. early stateless infants probably didn't explicitly decide to enter into a social contract. There's basically no particular a priori reason why families exist (for example, the Ik people in Uganda seem to have no or a very weak concept of using familial relations for survival, even to protect their young), and very likely that this evolution was just the model happened to win out due to random noise in history rather than actual optimality.
Again I would like to stress how much the current societal configuration is mostly just noise instead of signal.
[1] For an introduction, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a...
[2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus
[4] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-...
Yet now you write that everyone acting game-theoretically optimally is not actually possible.
So you were criticizing an impossible scenario?
Since I agree with you that literally everyone acting game-theoretically optimally is impossible, I took your earlier use of the concept to mean something possible, that is, everyone acting as close to game-theoretically optimally as they are capable, and used the concept in the same way.
The multipolar trap manifests itself in real life in lots of simple ways already. The original essay has some examples, but the tragedy of the commons is the quintessential example.
The multipolar trap as a totalizing behavior is not an impossible scenario, but just currently infeasible for most sufficiently complex scenarios given the bounded reality. Which means it becomes a cause for concern as the bounds on rationality increase (through computation, through organization, etc.). That's why we should be wary of decentralized systems in the long run.
What you said was "everyone" was always acting game-theoretically already and therefore that what we currently have is game-theoretically optimal, which is what I disagreed with.
Coordination doesn't imply regulation, conventions (which doesn't imply any chief/judge) are sufficient.
Top-town authoritarianism is IMHO worse than decentralization.
Some of them would call or email me with some really important, not previously discussed thing that they absolutely needed to have (but really didn't). Where in the past I'd immediately take this request seriously and discuss how many hours/days of work this would reasonably take, I now often give them an unusually high indication at first. If the conversation continues and it becomes clear that they really do want/need said feature, I'll come up with a more realistic indication.
1) thing is not essential, you saved the cost
2) a workaround that is inconvenient or costly exists, compare costs
3) you just caused an opportunity cost
In other words, you're breaking the process. Unless you're a process engineer and track both causes and results diligently you should not do that. Ever.
Obviously one should use common sense to avoid adverse outcomes. Inexpensive productivity tools get approved more quickly, whereas upgrades to perfectly fine but previous generation laptops may take a week or so :-).
Then the role of some person should be to gather such tacit knowledge and convert it into a usable and transmittable form.
Now if they do not know about one, they probably should be informed. :)
Perhaps you're not filtering out requests on the basis of need, but on the ability of some individuals over others to figure out the unwritten rules and choose to play your game.
Yes, it is possible that people are gaming my tactic and I am optimizing for the wrong variable, but in practice that doesn't seem to happen.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-07-28
http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-07-29
The "approved list" as a philosophy or state of mind remains one of the best approaches.
So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV. For being the primary identity providers of the US populace, the DMVs of US states are actually rather remarkable. I guess the seemingly arbitrary progression of ticket numbers in cavernous waiting rooms is valid annoyance, but watermarked cards being mailed out to thousands of people just a few business days after collecting their info is pretty good, and then there's more vehicles than that.
Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, but it's worth applying the "I could've built that" test for them the same way it's trendy to critique valuable companies that are "just a chat app". If you had to credential 35 million people and 39 million vehicles a year, how would you do it? Would you codify a few things, and hire rockstars who can think on their feet? How soon would you start making rules about the blatantness of invalid forms, or unpaid fees, or how many people would you have to catch selling favors before you re-examine the process?
Deep bureaucracies are often the emergent result when your process has been burned by costly customers (in time, money, effort) or rogue employees (corruption, graft, espionage) too many times. They are systems where each and every decision maker can always defer to the Process as an explanation for why someone can't have something and the Process is sacred because "it's always been that way", even if it changes, and where each and every fulfiller is powerless to truly make a meaningful exception, except when that feature was already built in.
> So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV
Maybe read it again? The author raises a coherent hypothesis, then questions it as a widely explanatory principle, using the DMV explicitly and intentionally as an example of bureaucratic inefficiency that it describes poorly.
We should remember sometimes that not everyone thinks in terms of bandwidth and scale.
Time and exasperation people are willing to put up with in order to get what they want is a form of co-payment. Part of it is paid for by the insured (as a "proof of real need"), another part being the bureaucracy which is paid by all insured people. Any insured may prefer to wait (than to occupy the bureaucracy by filling useless forms...) because it is far cheaper (no work for him nor for the bureaucracy), but this is rarely possible because there are urgent cases, and also because it seems more frustrating.
"Orgs have an incentive not to respond yes to every request they get" - not true. Orgs have an incentive to reduce the cost of saying yes, but saying yes is an important part of providing good customer service, keeping repeat business, and building a brand that enables bigger growth. Orgs that lose sight of this, deserve to be eaten by their competitors.
It's also wrong to assume that just because a company gets acquired, that there's going to be 'unnecessary levels of administration and other associated costs' that are just begging for the ax. Pharma companies have finance people too that can provide that kind of oversight and recommendations.
The market for drugs is complicated by two factors. First is that people who need drugs generally can't get that need met by any other product / service. So there's an incentive for price creep. Second is the patent system which forces companies to grab as much cash as they can until the patent expires.
If longer patents were granted, or the patent system were more sane in that the patent period doesn't begin until after the drug is able to be made available to the market, then the costs of developing drugs would be a lot more legible, and therefore amortizable.
Also are you seriously arguing here for longer patent terms? You think that will get new products to market more quickly?
Certainly, once a bureaucracy got to that point, it might have certain benefits, but I don't see how that implies there was a conscious strategy before.
Unbelievably, the medication example the author uses is a system I have direct experience with. It is a group whose job it is to make the decision of whether insurance covers a drug that a doctor has prescribed.
The triage is more sophisticated than a queue management ritual, but also has elements of it in it.
Some insurer programs require that the patient be declined by another one before paying for the prescription, so the doctors fill out hopeless requests because they need the rejection letter to achieve their outcome. This fills the decision queues, and everyone experiences the lag. Consider doctors handwriting as a next order CV problem, and then think about the attitude of the user demographic who doesn't feel obligated to be clear about their intentions - now design a digital product for them.
Bureaucracy in real life is a kind of cluster-governance, where nobody serves each other, and everyone presumes everyone else is coming to them to be regulated. Further, they really do think their job is to avoid obligations to others unless they are somehow mandated to have one.
I can say that agile development methods are disrupting bureaucracy in a big way. You don't see it, but every online license renewal and filing system wipes out layers of bureaucracy. The systems take years to develop because the personal/business relationships that made those systems work need to be identified and unraveled before you implement them in code. I would argue you don't understand stakeholder management unless you have spent time in a bureaucracy, and the people who do succeed at it in the private sector often do so as the result of both luck and negative anti-patterns.
I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary.
Tech is an expression of how its users want to relate, and in this way it's culture. When we impose tech on institutions, it realigns them to organize around the relational patterns in the tech.
Bureaucracy is an active ingredient, and the tech we develop changes it. Want a better DMV? Build one.
Please elaborate. I would be very interested to hear more about this from your perspective. Thanks!
It created the abstractions of clients and services and put enterprise architecture in the middle. All projects became IT projects.
Today, the clash of iterative methods that provide makers with almost total autonomy vs. waterfall PM oversight and governance is the key friction point in large institutions, imho.