Reflecting on yesterday’s case study in broken government I had a couple of addition thoughts that I thought fun to explore and that simply did not make sense including in the original post.
A Government 2.0 Response
Yesterday’s piece was all about how Treasury Board’s new rules were likely to increase the velocity of paperwork to a far greater cost than the elimination of excess travel.
One commentator noted a more Gov 2.0 type solution that I’d been mulling over myself. Why not simply treat the government travel problem as a big data problem? Surely there are tools that would allow you to look at government travel in aggregate, maybe mashed it up against GEDS data (job title and department information) that would enable one to quickly identify outliers and other high risk travel that are worthy of closer inspection. I’m not talking about people who travel a lot (that wouldn’t be helpful) but rather people who engage in unusual travel that is hard to reconcile with their role.
While I’m confident that many public servants would find such an approach discomforting, it would be entirely within the purview of their employer to engage in such an analysis. It would also be far more effective, targeted and a deterrent (I suspect, over time) than the kind of blanket policy I wrote about yesterday that is just as (if not more) likely to eliminate necessary travel as it is unnecessary travel. Of course, if you just want to eliminate travel because you think any face to face, group or in person learning is simply not worth the expense – than the latter approach is probably more effective.
Wikileaks and Treasury Board
Of course re-reading yesterday’s post I was having a faint twinge of familiarity. I suddenly realized that my analysis of the impact of the travel restriction policy on government has parallels to the goal that drove Assange to create wikileaks. If you’ve not read Zunguzungu blog post exploring Assange’s writings about the “theory of change” of wikileaks I cannot encourage you enough to go and read it. At its core lies a simple assessment – that wikileaks is trying to shut down the “conspiracy of the state” by making it harder for effective information to be transmitted within the state. Of course, restricting travel is not nearly the same as making it impossible for public servants to communicate, but it does compromise the ability to coordinate and plan effectively – as such the essay is illuminating in thinking about how these types of policies impact not the hierarchy of an organization, but the hidden and open networks (the secret government) that help make the organization function.
Read this extract below below for a taste:
This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:
This is obviously a totally different context – but it is interesting to see that one way to alter an organizations is to change the way in which information flows around it. This was not – I suspect – the primary goal of the Treasury Board directive (it was a cost driven measure) but the above paragraph is an example of the unintended consequences. Less communication means the ability of the organization to function could be compromised.
Bureaucratic Directive’s as an Analog Denial of Service Attack
There is, of course, another more radical way of thinking about the Treasury Board directive. One of the key points I tried to make yesterday was that the directive was likely to increase the velocity of bureaucratic paperwork, tie up a larger amount of junior and, more preciously, senior resource time, all while actually allowing less work to be done.
Now if a government department were a computer, and I was able to make it send more requests that slowed its CPU (decision making capacity) and thus made other functions harder to perform – and in extreme cases actually prevented any work from happening – that would be something pretty similar to a Denial of Service attack.
Again, I’m not claiming that this was the intent, but it is a fun and interesting lens by which to look at the problem. More to explore here, I’m sure.
Hopefully this has bent a few minds and helped people see the world differently.
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