ORacle

By Doug Samuelson

“So, Jim, how was that conference you attended the other day?” Tom, one of the OR/MS analyst’s colleagues, asked on his return to the office.

“The conference was good,” Jim replied, “but some of the arrangements were pretty messed up. And this conference was arranged by one of the biggest, best-known IT and analytics companies in the world, one that advertises all the time about how they’re using IT to improve all kinds of activities, all over the planet. It would be pretty funny at a safe distance.”

“How so?” Russ, another of his colleagues inquired.

“I pre-registered a few days in advance, close to the deadline,” Jim explained. “But when I got there, they told me they’d had a computer glitch and the badges hadn’t printed. That would have been OK, but the printers they were supposed to be using for on-site registrations weren’t working either. So I wound up with a hand-printed badge.”

“Sounds like no big deal,” Russ shrugged.

“It wasn’t,” Jim conceded, “but their explanation was classic. This conference was in the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, that big building in Federal Triangle that is possibly the most ironically named memorial in town. The Center’s stated mission is to promote public-private partnerships, projecting government’s role in helping business. Not exactly what I remember as one of Reagan’s core principles. Right?”

The others nodded and laughed.

“The only more ironically named memorial, of course,” Jim continued, “is Reagan National Airport, a fine reminder of the air traffic controllers’ strike. The only president of the U.S. who had ever also been president of a labor union wound up busting a union. I don’t think even Reagan was happy about that.”

“OK,” Tom prodded him gently, “but what about the conference?”

“One of the senior arrangements people told me,” Jim recounted, “that the problem was with the Reagan Center’s IT support. Their network and their printers just weren’t reliable. Neither was the free wireless Internet throughout the facility, for that matter. And the sponsoring company knew this: “Oh, yes, we’d had the same problems last year and the year before, but they’d promised to fix things this time.’ At this point I couldn’t resist speculating about what Ronald Reagan would have thought of this. I tilted my head a little to one side, with his little smile and in my best raspy-voice Reagan imitation, said, ‘Well... what did I keep telling you about relying on government agencies to do anything?’ ”

The group all laughed.

Then Jim added, “So, I asked, if you knew that this could be an issue, why didn’t you just bring a spare printer? This is where it got really funny, or just plain weird, depending on your point of view. It seems this large innovative IT company has its own bureaucracy and its own huge tangle of procedures and processes. There were protocols about how to negotiate with the Reagan Center people and about who gets to do that. There are protocols for checking out company equipment, too, and you can’t get through them quickly. There are serious restrictions on using non-company equipment in conjunction with company equipment, or in a setting where the company is prominently visible. So, long story short, the company can develop massive projects to make big activities work better, but simple, obvious little fixes are impossible to implement!

“And of course,” Jim went on, “even though there are several big hotels with excellent conference facilities within six blocks, you don’t suppose anyone below maybe a senior VP has authority to, you know, negotiate and let the market work to obtain the best deal on these services, do you? How’s that for not following Reagan’s guidance?”

“I used to work for that company,” Tom responded, “and you’re SOOO right! They hired me for a project that required a high-level security clearance. So I had to fill out forms to start, but we couldn’t do that at the client’s site because I wasn’t yet cleared to enter the building. Well, no problem. This company has what they call ‘hotel office space’ for their senior people – just call or e-mail in and tell them which of their many facilities you need to work in, and they have offices set up for such occasions. The senior manager who had hired me decided to have us meet at the facility nearest his house – more convenient for him, didn’t matter to me.

“But when I got there, it turned out that he needed to fill out an e-mail request a day in advance to have authority to sign me into that building! He didn’t know this because it was a recent procedure change, announced in an e-mail that got sent to all the regular users of that building, and he wasn’t one of those. So this very senior guy had to ask me to cool my heels in the coffee shop downstairs for nearly an hour while he wrangled the authority to let me in.”

Again, the group laughed heartily. Then Russ grinned, “Maybe Reagan’s legacy is applicable here, more than we thought. This reminds me of a joke Jay Leno told not long after the Soviet Union fell apart. He said, ‘Communism didn’t work because they kept building these huge, clumsy, stifling, self-perpetuating government bureaucracies. Here we know better. We build those bureaucracies in the private sector!”

Doug Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo.com) is president and chief scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., in Annandale, Va., and a senior statistical analyst/subject matter expert for Great-Circle Technologies in Chantilly, Va., supporting various national security applications.