Tuesday, September 10, 2002

FROM [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] Tyranny, Terror, and Technology.  Some thoughts about the intersection between the challenges confronting business, and those confronting government and society. UNQUOTE Ray Ozzie's Weblog] This is a dynamite thought provoking essay - I highly recommend it - my words of wisdom pale in comparison. I believe that beaurocracy, and inter-communications within an organization, is like glue. Too much and the enterprise is all gummed up with rules that get in the way of doing the job. Too little and everyone is flying off in different directions, counter productive. The challenge is to get it just right, so that you have an agile team effort. This is further complicated by the organization fluctuating in size, so you need different strategies for different scales of operation.  Also there is a spread of individual skills of participants in the organization, so until you get everyone up to speed on something, there has to be another way of getting the job done.  Any time things are changed, there will be transitional confusion. Organizations can be too large and unwieldy. Remember the book The Mythical Man Month, which I consider to be one of the classics on software engineering? Basically the permutations of all the different people who need to intercommunicate can bog down some things so that nothing can get done. Thus it is essential to organize focus teams and have a hierarchy such that there is no wasted baggage in your structure that gets in the way of a lean and mean team. An excess of organizations focused on different tasks is good in business. Competition leads to better Quality, Features, Economies. An excess of organizations with overlapping responsibilities is bad in government. They can have turf wars that get in the way of them doing what they are supposed to be doing. 1:38:32 PM

FBI warns of potential threats [USA Today : Front Page] As usual, nothing specific ... if they had something specific they could stop it from happening ... except right before 9/11 both CIA and FBI were independently tailing 2 of the hijackers because of their involvement in a prior terrorist attack on USA and GOV was trying to identify all the conspirators, and what they up to, and build court case, but the 2 hijackers gave their tails the slip and the rest is history.  There is a hard balance there to achieve between ability to get a court conviction, round up evidence what going on, (correlate the masses of clues that they get, many of which might be misleading or erroneous), and actually prevent something bad from happening. Unconfirmed reports of AlQ targeting oil tankers, add that to laundry list of other things identified in past like nuclear power plants, and shipping containers. Question detainees - risk they will share every fantasy whacko scheme any alQ group ever dreamed up, but was abandoned as impractical. I sure hope GOV and MIL doing war game simulations into what might go wrong, and keep secret results until they have plugged holes that the simulations uncover. Historical patterns logic ... Our enemies hate what West stands for, and international western institutions, so they may target meetings of UN or World Bank. Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday when Amercian Air Defense at Peace and high religious ethic what do on a Sunday. Oklahoma City was on the anniversary of Waco because some whacko with no relationship to Waco wanted to do something on that anniversary date. Well, people who hate us are inspired by bin Laden example, people with no contact with alQ. I sure hope long term Foreign Policy goals can include addressing why these people hate us so much, and do something about turning the tide of recruitments into ranks of our enemies, so that potential enemies do not go down that path. 1:18:17 PM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.