The people on this project knew quite well that using this [Enterprise System Bus] was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it. Was it really possible that this project was delayed indefinitely, racking up cost overruns in the billions, because Congress has ordered the executive branch to specify something as small and technical as an ESB?
The short answer is no. But it’s important to understand why pretty much everyone thought it was yes [...] the law as it was enacted required each federal agency to have an “Information Technology Architecture.” There was a sense that the technical architectures of the various agencies should be coordinated in some way, so the CIO Council got the job of coming up with that uber-architecture. The result seems to have been a classic example of design by committee. However the document came together, the 434-page Federal Enterprise Architecture, released in 1999, requires that federal technology solutions have a “service-oriented architecture.” And it defines that in terms of an Enterprise Service Bus.
It’s true that many laws and policies fail because they are overly prescriptive and lock implementers into a narrow set of options. But that is not quite what happened here. Neither the Clinger-Cohen Act nor any other law explicitly required an ESB. Nowhere in the Federal Enterprise Architecture does it say “thou shalt always use an enterprise service bus.” There are five mentions of “enterprise service bus” in the document, but all of them are in charts or diagrams listing various application components that could support interoperability. ESBs became mandatory in practice within the Department of Defense through overzealous interpretations of law, policy, and guidance, combined with lack of technical understanding.
[....]
How does this happen? When there are big, visible delivery failures, like HealthCare.gov or the unemployment insurance crisis, public servants are trapped between two distinct systems of accountability. In the first, politicians will hold the public servants accountable for outcomes [...]
In the second system of accountability, various parts of the administrative state—the agency itself, the inspector general, the Government Accountability Office—will hold these same public servants accountable to process. Procurement and planning documents will be reviewed for any gaps, any skipped or partially skipped steps, any deviance from standard protocol, even if that deviance is legal, just nonstandard. If an ESB is thought to be “best practice”—even if it is not at all best practice—why wasn’t it used?
[...]
As painful and sometimes humiliating as [Congressional] hearings are, if you’re a career civil servant, it is the second system of accountability that matters more to you. The legislature can’t fire or officially reprimand you, no matter how bad a job they think you did (although they can put political pressure on the administration to do so). They can’t make you ineligible for promotions and raises. On the other hand, violations of policy, process, and procedure—real or perceived—can do all of that, even if there is no hearing. [...]
These dynamics kick into overdrive when technical issues are in question. Even the most competent tech team can hit resistance when trying to explain, for instance, why there should not be an ESB in the software they are building. A team could point out that it was only suggested, not required, and Weaver tried to do just that. [...] Arguments about what is or isn’t required happen all the time, but they are much less likely to lead to a suffocatingly risk-averse answer when the people involved in the argument understand the domain. Here, aside from the tech team, it is highly unlikely that anyone else in the debate—likely to be dozens of people in dozens of different roles—had any basis on which to judge whether an ESB was a good thing or a bad thing in this context. Thus, to nix the ESB, dozens of people in dozens of different roles would all have had to agree to jeopardize their jobs over a recommendation they didn’t understand. These discussions tend to function as a vetocracy, in which it takes all thumbs up in order to accept the risk, and only one thumbs down to stick with the less-risky option. The ESB stays.
In the business world, they say that culture eats strategy for breakfast—meaning that the people implementing the strategy, and the skills, attitudes, and assumptions they bring to it, will make more difference than even the most brilliant plan. In government, culture eats policy. Even when legislators and policymakers try to give implementers the flexibility to exercise judgment, the words they write take on an entirely different meaning, and have a very different effect, as they descend through the hierarchy, becoming more rigid with every step.
The irony is how eagerly each rung in the hierarchy is trying to please its superiors. [...]
[...]
The key to a healthier culture in our bureaucracy is people. Our infrastructure for recruiting, hiring, promoting, and retaining them has been sorely neglected. It’s not just the ironies of fairness that need a closer look. Despite radical changes in the world around us, the Classification Act of 1949 is the last time we reformed how managerial jobs in the federal merit system are organized.
I'm not quite sure what discussion you want to have around this, and it's pretty specific in this case. Here's the interpretation I get: Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) This is a software...
I'm not quite sure what discussion you want to have around this, and it's pretty specific in this case. Here's the interpretation I get:
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
This is a software architecture model used for designing and implementing the interaction and communication between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It is essentially a set of rules for how software components should interact with each other.
ESB Requirements
In the scenario described, a project was delayed because it was believed that the use of an ESB was required by law. This requirement came from a series of bureaucratic steps: Congress asked for a Federal Enterprise Architecture, that then required a Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture, which in turn mandated an Air Force Enterprise Architecture. Each of these steps added more requirements, and an ESB was believed to be one of them.
Misinterpretation
However, it turns out that the law didn't actually demand an ESB. It was a misunderstanding. The mandate for an ESB emerged from an overzealous interpretation of the policy, possibly due to a lack of technical understanding.
Two accountability systems
They talk about two systems of accountability that public servants face. One is from politicians, who hold them accountable for outcomes. The other is from the administrative state (like the agency itself or the Government Accountability Office), which holds them accountable to process, policies, and procedures. The latter often leads to a conservative, risk-averse approach to avoid potential reprimands.
The struggle to change
When technical issues are involved, it's even harder to drive change because only the tech team truly understands what's going on. Anyone else involved might lack the knowledge to assess whether a certain technology (like the ESB) is beneficial. To remove the ESB, every person involved would need to take a risk they don't fully understand, which is highly unlikely. This leads to a culture of fear and risk-avoidance that overrides good policy.
People-centered change
The passage ends by suggesting that the key to fixing these problems is improving how we recruit, hire, promote, and retain people in the bureaucracy. The way jobs in the federal system are organized hasn't been reformed since 1949, despite the world changing drastically since then.
Yes, it's all based on one example. I thought it was an interesting story about how US government bureaucracy can become inflexible and dysfunctional despite everyone involved being not only...
Yes, it's all based on one example. I thought it was an interesting story about how US government bureaucracy can become inflexible and dysfunctional despite everyone involved being not only pretty well-meaning but eager to please. So often, people talking about government dysfunction assume the worst of the people involved.
Maybe that's generalizing too much from one story, though?
I'm always a little suspicious about the Niskanen think tank's agenda, since it's libertarian-leaning, and doesn't always disclose pro-market analysis. What this article doesn't expose is that the...
I'm always a little suspicious about the Niskanen think tank's agenda, since it's libertarian-leaning, and doesn't always disclose pro-market analysis. What this article doesn't expose is that the same thing happens in the private business world as well.
Any deeply hierarchical institution will force unsuitable policies and procedures down to the "execution" levels, which constrain action in counterproductive ways. The "decision maker" level has imperatives (e.g. share price, stakeholder opinions, competition for advancement, love of leadership roles) that differ from the "execution" level (e.g. staying employed, earning more, personal ethics, love of craftsmanship). What seem like sensible organizational checks and balances at 10,000 ft. often don't make much sense on the ground terrain.
As a personal example, depending on the customer's institutional requirements, it often takes me a week's worth of documentation, meetings, and executive signoffs to execute a 5 minute application config change. There are seemingly good justifications for each part of this, but ultimately it drastically increases costs and wastes my knowledge when there are better uses of that time.
On the HR side, I've had to deal with the same first-pass, keyword/box-checking junk that filters out genuinely qualified candidates, and wasted my time interviewing the manifestly unqualified.
The market does tend to creatively destroy businesses which can't revise their hierarchical processes occasionally. But a well-informed electorate at least theoretically has the same power where democratic governments are concerned.
Having clients across govt, NGOs, and industry I can definitively say the scale and nature of these dysfunctions in the federal government are completely different. Insofar as it happens in the...
Having clients across govt, NGOs, and industry I can definitively say the scale and nature of these dysfunctions in the federal government are completely different. Insofar as it happens in the private sector it tends to be in specific industries, usually ones that are heavily regulated or insulated from market forces through monopoly powers (like utility companies or health insurers).
The other big problem this doesn’t address, and that happens in industry as well, is that expertise in many of these areas among leadership is so hollowed out that they are no longer able to have intelligent opinions on design and solution architecture. What fills the gap is salespeople from various technology vendors (in the same way lobbyists fill the gap when legislators have no policy experience or contacts). This leads to an issue I call “vendor defined requirements.” The only people they talk to who may be able to solve their problem are the companies who sell solutions, so you end up with piles of money going around buying solutions and technologies and platforms but no clear idea of what specific business or managerial itch those things are supposed to address. There’s no holistic strategy behind it.
I've dealt with military and OSHA government bureaucracy - I think it's as much to do with the number of layers, complicated interagency relationships, and underfunding, as it is anything unique...
I've dealt with military and OSHA government bureaucracy - I think it's as much to do with the number of layers, complicated interagency relationships, and underfunding, as it is anything unique about government vs. business hierarchies.
And gosh, I hear you about "vendor defined requirements" and the hollowing out of expertise. Outsourcing by government and businesses has become so widespread that there are now effective private contractor monopolies of experts (looking at Accenture, McKinsey, et al.).
I think a lot of the hollowing out of expertise is a long-term consequence of underfunding. And the layers and layers of management and interagency relationships are the (very ineffective)...
I think a lot of the hollowing out of expertise is a long-term consequence of underfunding. And the layers and layers of management and interagency relationships are the (very ineffective) attempts at trying to make do when the govt no longer has the means to recruit the best and the brightest of anything in sufficient concentration to make a difference rather than frustrating and burning out everyone involved.
Yes, it's true that dysfunction can be found in many organizations and there's definitely a lot of it in business. There are plenty of soul-sucking jobs out there. You have to look carefully and...
Yes, it's true that dysfunction can be found in many organizations and there's definitely a lot of it in business. There are plenty of soul-sucking jobs out there. You have to look carefully and have a bit of luck to avoid them.
I'm somewhat irked by public vs. private comparisons because it sounds like making excuses by saying someone else is worse. We shouldn't excuse bureaucratic dysfunction in business by saying "at least it's not as bad as government bureaucracy!"
That's not what you said and I don't think it's what you meant. It's just reminding me of other discussions. I'll use it as a writing prompt anyway:
One way to interpret an article about significant government problems is that it makes government look bad, and that plays into the hands of people who want to see government functions downsized or outsourced.
But you could also interpret it as a message from someone who cares. If you know about government dysfunction and you want it to work better, and you're an outsider, what do you do to improve it? Outside criticism has its place. This is how we justify the existence of newspapers.
It seems like the author of this article went out of their way to avoid blaming specific people and explain a systemic problem. I think it's based on a book they wrote? Making government look bad seems a lot lower-effort than writing a book, though I suppose people write books for their own reasons. Anyway, I assume good intent.
Even when they don't have good intentions, there is a "baptists and bootleggers" quality to these sort of investigations that keeps me reading libertarians, as long as they're somewhat sane.
There are libertarian bloggers who will write "FDA delenda est" as a sort of catch-phrase. I don't agree with that. Maybe they're joking, but it's kind of a rude and nasty joke. They do share interesting links, sometimes. I learn more about how the FDA works (and sometimes fails to work) from them than from the people who blindly defend them and otherwise don't pay much attention, or the insiders who have learned from experience never to say anything remotely critical about anyone in public because it would jeopardize their careers.
I'm in favor of politeness and mostly dislike exaggeration, but intent isn't at the top of the list for whether I find an article worth reading. The gadflies say interesting things sometimes. Investigative reporters are sometimes one step removed from conspiracy theorists, but they can be good to read as long as they still care about getting the story right.
Caring about the truth is key, even though it doesn't mean people don't have other agendas, like telling a good story.
For fiction, the priorities are reversed. Story comes first and truth second. It reminds me of Scott Adams, who was all about exaggeration and made a lot of funny comics about bureaucratic dysfunction before going off the deep end. I don't think the people who posted Dilbert comics to their cubicles back in the day were all libertarians. The comics were funny and there was some truth behind the obvious exaggerations that appealed to them. Sometimes you can remember the good parts even though it ended badly.
I said Niskanen Center was a suspect source, but let me clarify that I agree with article as-is even if the analysis is incomplete. As you say, the author, Jennifer Pahlka, seems to be writing in...
I said Niskanen Center was a suspect source, but let me clarify that I agree with article as-is even if the analysis is incomplete. As you say, the author, Jennifer Pahlka, seems to be writing in good faith. She went out of her way to explore a concrete and easily verifiable example, avoided pointing fingers, and could certainly have introduced the possibility of corrupt intent had she wished to draw overtly political conclusions.
For the record, Jennifer Pahlka is not exactly an outsider - she was deputy to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and founder of the U.S. Digital Service. I trust that she has a thorough understanding of how the sausage is made and that her structural criticisms are based on expertise, at least as far as government use of information technology is concerned.
I appreciate that you're trying to provide a fair assessment of the text presented. Please don't interpret my comments as excusing U.S. government bureaucratic dysfunction simply because it's got aspects of hierarchical faults in general. I've seen government bureaucratic failings, worked with/around them, been on the receiving end of them, and pay for them. We're watching infrastructure crumble all around us in real time, people are dying right now because services mandated under existing laws can't be delivered due to red tape and cost overruns. I'll read Pahlka's book with great interest when it becomes available.
From the article:
[....]
[...]
[...]
I'm not quite sure what discussion you want to have around this, and it's pretty specific in this case. Here's the interpretation I get:
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
This is a software architecture model used for designing and implementing the interaction and communication between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It is essentially a set of rules for how software components should interact with each other.
ESB Requirements
In the scenario described, a project was delayed because it was believed that the use of an ESB was required by law. This requirement came from a series of bureaucratic steps: Congress asked for a Federal Enterprise Architecture, that then required a Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture, which in turn mandated an Air Force Enterprise Architecture. Each of these steps added more requirements, and an ESB was believed to be one of them.
Misinterpretation
However, it turns out that the law didn't actually demand an ESB. It was a misunderstanding. The mandate for an ESB emerged from an overzealous interpretation of the policy, possibly due to a lack of technical understanding.
Two accountability systems
They talk about two systems of accountability that public servants face. One is from politicians, who hold them accountable for outcomes. The other is from the administrative state (like the agency itself or the Government Accountability Office), which holds them accountable to process, policies, and procedures. The latter often leads to a conservative, risk-averse approach to avoid potential reprimands.
The struggle to change
When technical issues are involved, it's even harder to drive change because only the tech team truly understands what's going on. Anyone else involved might lack the knowledge to assess whether a certain technology (like the ESB) is beneficial. To remove the ESB, every person involved would need to take a risk they don't fully understand, which is highly unlikely. This leads to a culture of fear and risk-avoidance that overrides good policy.
People-centered change
The passage ends by suggesting that the key to fixing these problems is improving how we recruit, hire, promote, and retain people in the bureaucracy. The way jobs in the federal system are organized hasn't been reformed since 1949, despite the world changing drastically since then.
Yes, it's all based on one example. I thought it was an interesting story about how US government bureaucracy can become inflexible and dysfunctional despite everyone involved being not only pretty well-meaning but eager to please. So often, people talking about government dysfunction assume the worst of the people involved.
Maybe that's generalizing too much from one story, though?
I'm always a little suspicious about the Niskanen think tank's agenda, since it's libertarian-leaning, and doesn't always disclose pro-market analysis. What this article doesn't expose is that the same thing happens in the private business world as well.
Any deeply hierarchical institution will force unsuitable policies and procedures down to the "execution" levels, which constrain action in counterproductive ways. The "decision maker" level has imperatives (e.g. share price, stakeholder opinions, competition for advancement, love of leadership roles) that differ from the "execution" level (e.g. staying employed, earning more, personal ethics, love of craftsmanship). What seem like sensible organizational checks and balances at 10,000 ft. often don't make much sense on the ground terrain.
As a personal example, depending on the customer's institutional requirements, it often takes me a week's worth of documentation, meetings, and executive signoffs to execute a 5 minute application config change. There are seemingly good justifications for each part of this, but ultimately it drastically increases costs and wastes my knowledge when there are better uses of that time.
On the HR side, I've had to deal with the same first-pass, keyword/box-checking junk that filters out genuinely qualified candidates, and wasted my time interviewing the manifestly unqualified.
The market does tend to creatively destroy businesses which can't revise their hierarchical processes occasionally. But a well-informed electorate at least theoretically has the same power where democratic governments are concerned.
Having clients across govt, NGOs, and industry I can definitively say the scale and nature of these dysfunctions in the federal government are completely different. Insofar as it happens in the private sector it tends to be in specific industries, usually ones that are heavily regulated or insulated from market forces through monopoly powers (like utility companies or health insurers).
The other big problem this doesn’t address, and that happens in industry as well, is that expertise in many of these areas among leadership is so hollowed out that they are no longer able to have intelligent opinions on design and solution architecture. What fills the gap is salespeople from various technology vendors (in the same way lobbyists fill the gap when legislators have no policy experience or contacts). This leads to an issue I call “vendor defined requirements.” The only people they talk to who may be able to solve their problem are the companies who sell solutions, so you end up with piles of money going around buying solutions and technologies and platforms but no clear idea of what specific business or managerial itch those things are supposed to address. There’s no holistic strategy behind it.
I've dealt with military and OSHA government bureaucracy - I think it's as much to do with the number of layers, complicated interagency relationships, and underfunding, as it is anything unique about government vs. business hierarchies.
And gosh, I hear you about "vendor defined requirements" and the hollowing out of expertise. Outsourcing by government and businesses has become so widespread that there are now effective private contractor monopolies of experts (looking at Accenture, McKinsey, et al.).
I think a lot of the hollowing out of expertise is a long-term consequence of underfunding. And the layers and layers of management and interagency relationships are the (very ineffective) attempts at trying to make do when the govt no longer has the means to recruit the best and the brightest of anything in sufficient concentration to make a difference rather than frustrating and burning out everyone involved.
Yes, it's true that dysfunction can be found in many organizations and there's definitely a lot of it in business. There are plenty of soul-sucking jobs out there. You have to look carefully and have a bit of luck to avoid them.
I'm somewhat irked by public vs. private comparisons because it sounds like making excuses by saying someone else is worse. We shouldn't excuse bureaucratic dysfunction in business by saying "at least it's not as bad as government bureaucracy!"
That's not what you said and I don't think it's what you meant. It's just reminding me of other discussions. I'll use it as a writing prompt anyway:
One way to interpret an article about significant government problems is that it makes government look bad, and that plays into the hands of people who want to see government functions downsized or outsourced.
But you could also interpret it as a message from someone who cares. If you know about government dysfunction and you want it to work better, and you're an outsider, what do you do to improve it? Outside criticism has its place. This is how we justify the existence of newspapers.
It seems like the author of this article went out of their way to avoid blaming specific people and explain a systemic problem. I think it's based on a book they wrote? Making government look bad seems a lot lower-effort than writing a book, though I suppose people write books for their own reasons. Anyway, I assume good intent.
Even when they don't have good intentions, there is a "baptists and bootleggers" quality to these sort of investigations that keeps me reading libertarians, as long as they're somewhat sane.
There are libertarian bloggers who will write "FDA delenda est" as a sort of catch-phrase. I don't agree with that. Maybe they're joking, but it's kind of a rude and nasty joke. They do share interesting links, sometimes. I learn more about how the FDA works (and sometimes fails to work) from them than from the people who blindly defend them and otherwise don't pay much attention, or the insiders who have learned from experience never to say anything remotely critical about anyone in public because it would jeopardize their careers.
I'm in favor of politeness and mostly dislike exaggeration, but intent isn't at the top of the list for whether I find an article worth reading. The gadflies say interesting things sometimes. Investigative reporters are sometimes one step removed from conspiracy theorists, but they can be good to read as long as they still care about getting the story right.
Caring about the truth is key, even though it doesn't mean people don't have other agendas, like telling a good story.
For fiction, the priorities are reversed. Story comes first and truth second. It reminds me of Scott Adams, who was all about exaggeration and made a lot of funny comics about bureaucratic dysfunction before going off the deep end. I don't think the people who posted Dilbert comics to their cubicles back in the day were all libertarians. The comics were funny and there was some truth behind the obvious exaggerations that appealed to them. Sometimes you can remember the good parts even though it ended badly.
I said Niskanen Center was a suspect source, but let me clarify that I agree with article as-is even if the analysis is incomplete. As you say, the author, Jennifer Pahlka, seems to be writing in good faith. She went out of her way to explore a concrete and easily verifiable example, avoided pointing fingers, and could certainly have introduced the possibility of corrupt intent had she wished to draw overtly political conclusions.
For the record, Jennifer Pahlka is not exactly an outsider - she was deputy to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and founder of the U.S. Digital Service. I trust that she has a thorough understanding of how the sausage is made and that her structural criticisms are based on expertise, at least as far as government use of information technology is concerned.
I appreciate that you're trying to provide a fair assessment of the text presented. Please don't interpret my comments as excusing U.S. government bureaucratic dysfunction simply because it's got aspects of hierarchical faults in general. I've seen government bureaucratic failings, worked with/around them, been on the receiving end of them, and pay for them. We're watching infrastructure crumble all around us in real time, people are dying right now because services mandated under existing laws can't be delivered due to red tape and cost overruns. I'll read Pahlka's book with great interest when it becomes available.
There was also a good Ezra Klein show on the topic (I think it even used the same case study?) with Jennifer Pahkler.
NYTimes Page
Raw Episode