Silos, Innovation, and the Internet

 I remember the burst of enthusiasm surrounding the discovery that the Internet/WWW could be used for business.  Soon it became mandatory for every business to have its own website. Expertise in doing sites was short, so some found a profitable business in creating websites.  I still hear their advertisements from time to time.

Normally I prefer to do business in writing rather than talking, so that meant I was happy with this innovation.  And more and more I found the businesses with whom I wanted to deal had websites.

In the past few years, though, I've tried to deal with businesses who have websites but who don't respond when I send them an email or fill out the contact form on the site.  Sometimes I've reverted to calling them, but usually they lose my business.

What's going on?  I've no proof, not even any data, but my suspicion is it's part of a general parttern:  when an organization has something new to do they:

• may contract it out, or set up a new group to do it.
• they rarely look at how it could impact or improve their existing operations--it's easier to keep doing what is familiar and comfortably within their knowledge and capabilities.
• once the new function (in this case a website) is set up, the initial enthusiasm which evoked the decision, money, and time needed to creat it tends to ebb, especially if the website doesn't show immediate payoffs.
• the end result is the website becomes a dusty relic of some bigshot's pet project  

You perhaps can guess that I think some of this applies to past initiatives by ASCS/FSA/USDA to change the way they operate. 

Indeed, I think it's part of the way our government works.  Part of the life cycle of government initiatives.

[In summary: often the way organizations innovate is by addition, not substitution, which leads to silos.]

Ukraine-Russia--Siloes Everywhere

  A quote from an assessment of the conflict: 

One challenge here is that NATO standardisation is not very standardised, with different countries’ howitzers not only having completely different maintenance requirements but also using different charges, fuses and sometimes shells.

The old story 

AFIDA Holes

 This points to possible problems in how FSA enforces the AFIDA legislation. I once was responsible for that.  I hoped someday to integrate AFIDA reports into the general system for updating land ownership once we got a common geospatial database with SCS.  

I retired before that happened.  It sounds as if it hasn't happened since.  Just another silo.

Protecting Our IT Infrastructure--and Bureaucracy

 Fred Kaplan has a Slate article on the problem of preventing attacks on IT infrastructure.  NSA has the charter to prevent attacks from foreign countries, but is prohibited from handling attacks based in the US, which is the loophole used by the recent Tradewinds attacks

Secretaries Gates (DOD) and Napolitano (DHS) had a plan to fill the hole, but Kaplan's piece gives the sorry history of how the workings of bureaucracy, NIHism, and different policy outlooks made the plan fail. 

Working across organizational divisions is always problematic.  VA and DOD have the problem of health records between active/reserve military and veterans; the FBI and NSA have the problem in counter-intelligence operations; State and DOD have the problem of state-building (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan); SCS and ASCS had the problem in handling sodbuster/swampbuster problems. 

Silos.  You can't live without them, you can't live with them.

Siloed Covid Data

 I posted about registering for an appointment for the vaccine shot through the Fairfax county site.  Then Sunday I got a shot from Kaiser Permanente.  Today I got an Invitation to Schedule Appointment from Fairfax county.  Unlike the Kaiser site, I can't find a way to update Fairfax's data to show I've been vaccinated.  I've emailed them with the problem.  If it's not solved, the vaccination data for Fairfax county residents will be inaccurate. 

[Update: got a nice response from Brian at the Fairfax site suggesting using my appointment ticket to cancel.  Responded that I tried, but couldn't see a way to do so. Amanda at the Fairfax site replied she'd tell the IT people to do it. 

I guess the stats could be handled by taking the population of Fairfax and comparing it to the sum of those vaccinated by various providers in the county.  That would assume that every provider identifies the residence of the people they jab.]