A little off-topic here, but I always get a kick out of people who insist that a particular industry, a particular business or even a particular organization is somehow special, exempt from the core principles and practices that make other organizations hum along. This can take many forms, ranging from people inside the organization making bad decisions based in magical thinking to people outside the organization passing policy based in magical thinking. The common denominator I observe is an inability to articulate the details or rationale behind this thinking coupled with a stubborn insistence that the outcomes they predict will somehow materialize. In other words, Bernie Sanders would fit right in with the worst of middle management.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working with Enterprise Resource Planning software. In simple terms, it is a database that models financially and operationally significant transactions that take place in an organization day-to-day, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year. Turning it on takes a little bit more than popping the DVD in and hitting “install”, but it is something that we know how to do fairly well at this point. I recently completed a short contract with a government entity that was two years behind schedule on a low-complexity ERP implementation project that was originally supposed to be done in one year.
Three years into a supposedly one-year project I was the first to inform project leadership that an entire branch of government was running Macintosh, which the solution was not designed for. Nobody bothered to take into account that several thousand people did not have access to a computer when the entire solution was predicated on everyone having exactly that. New requirements that could have been gathered with a series of hour-long phone calls at the start of the project were popping up every week, all because of magical thinking by bureaucrats who said the right things to higher-ranking bureaucrats but failed to do the things necessary to succeed, then got rewarded for it.
The project was recently cancelled, with little fanfare of course, and nearly 9 figures of taxpayer money is down the drain with absolutely nothing to show for it.
By the numbers, this particular government entity is among the better-run entities you’ll find. A local government entity in California recently sued SAP, insisting that their failure to implement the best ERP software in the world was because the most successful ERP software in the world doesn’t work. It’s laughable.
I was a conservative before this contract, but now that I’ve had a very close look at how this rather significant entity operates, I’m giving anarchism and nihilism a lot of consideration. Hence my de-facto position that government should be kept as far away from business as possible unless a very clear case can be made that it should interfere.
I’m still waiting for someone to make that case. Let’s hear some price control and market interference success stories!