Several decades ago I got called in to help rescue a company in receivership largely because they had hired a big name infotech [IT] consultancy to upgrade what had been a working System 38 "architecture" to Microsoft Client-server. My predecessor has been spending about $2 million a year and had, in reality, done pretty well at it - well enough I thought that his upgrade proposal to the i400 (AS/400) should have been a corporate no brainer.
Unfortunately his boss didn't know anything about systems but believed that any kid could easily do supply chain on a PC from the local drug store - and, worse, got along well with the highly personable re-boot or reload expert looking after the office PCs who, of course, encouraged this nonsense. As a result he went around his head of systems (who almost instantly took a job with IBM when he found out) to hire a big name Microsoft partner to replace the 25+ year old, but still working, System 38 with its dumb terminals and high cost components.
Since nothing worked and the contract was in litigation, I was able to replace the mess with my favorite solution for everything: Unix with smart terminals: in this case Sun gear with about 140 NCD 21" displays (70 pounds each!) and a newer variant of the software the company had been running on for years. Costs fell to less than half a million a year for three applications people posted in user offices and a data center consisting of a Unix guy I stole from Sun, and me.
When the company was making money again new senior management hired new systems people who promptly started a client-server redevelopment effort - ending, I believe, only after the company was taken over by a multi-national committed to SAP.
So why tell the story today? because I'm feeling annoyed and there's a general lesson here: when I rebuilt the power room for our house here in sunny Alberta I put the light on a motion detector - but left the original wall switch in place. That was a mistake: when people go in there they inevitably flip that switch - it's been going on for years, I've talked to them many many many times but they still do it: every single time.
That's the annoyance: the lesson is that people who think they know, will pay absolutely no attention to reality, revert to the original behavior or beliefs seconds after the stubbed toe or whatever stops hurting, and never permanently change. This isn't directly a matter or scale either: it's human behavior: and you can see it at work in everything from Soros et al trying to resurrect the third reich to my wife flipping a taped over switch.
Ultimately that is a key problem incoming conservative administrations have to face: the bureaucrats they have to depend on for advice and action will go into full suck-up mode one on one, but immediately revert to their real contempt for conservative views when out of sight.
So if, God willing, GOP majorities survive or even expand in the mid-terms (rose colored glasses on- so yes, that's going to happen) and Harper comes out of retirement to save Canada (not likely), they will need to find a good way to make all those toes hurt, all day, every day; for years. My suggestion: try the old spoils system again: just fire the top three or four levels in every bureaucracy and refill those jobs from the donor list - trust me, it can't be worse than what we do now.
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