Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Bureaucratic Realities: People and Commutes

Walter Pincus has a piece in the Post, passing on an article by an insider on how mundane bureaucratic realities undermined the reorganization of the intelligence community:
Neary [the insider] writes of initial false steps that hurt the organization, using an example that only bureaucrats understand. Under the legislation, the ODNI was not to share location with headquarters of any other community element, an effort to make sure it was not at Langley. So the ODNI went to Bolling Air Force Base, to the new building of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The first DNI, John D. Negroponte, wanted CIA people as staff members. But, writes Neary, since CIA types tended to live near Langley, the ODNI lost at least 10 percent of its staff. They didn't want to make the long commute.
At Bolling, many DIA employees living near the air base took jobs originally meant for those CIA staffers. Then, two years later, the ODNI was permanently located in the Virginia suburbs, beyond Langley, and the DIA workers found that they faced a commute longer than the CIA staffers who didn't want to travel to Bolling. "The merry-go-round ensured the staff never found its feet," Neary said.

In my experience, moves and reorganizations eat up lots of time, simply because they disrupt people's comfort zones. Who sits where (particularly back in the old days before smoking was banned--I spent hours trying to get compatible groupings of smokers and non-smokers. Never had a move more than a few hundred yards, but commuting was and is critical, particularly if not on Metro (subway).

And efforts to create a new organization spanning old agencies are difficult because you need to create the administrative support (space, equipment, funds, HR, accounting, etc.) without having a support organization. I realize that's the sort of thing which occupies the mind of a bureaucrat but is not the slightest interest to anyone else.

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