This means that Sailors with enough experience in the Navy are usually better off bringing copies of pertinent references and Navy instructions, especially if they have any kind of unusual case, so that they can hand-walk the clerk through the process that needs to be followed.
I suspect it’s a big contributor to the low morale in the NHS. Hard to feel valued when a regular conversation is “They don’t even pay me correctly.”
It doesn't work too well at the federal level because it's turned into a weak system filled with layers of legal nonsense for literal years, but some states (like Illinois) are pretty good about making it easy to litigate, and laws that are... surprisingly favorable for requesters. I got to witness a lawyer, who litigated FOIA at the the federal level, read the statute of Illinois FOIA for the first time, and he was jaw-droppingly gobsmacked by how much the law favors requesters.
So rather than employ people who either new how to install printers on windows or could work it out (follow the prompts in the wizard) for themselves we employed people who would happily follow the step by step instructions in our documentation.
Everything fell apart when we migrated to Windows XP, where the instructions no longer worked, the screenshots were out of date and those support personnel who used to rely on all the documentation for step by step on how to install printers were left scratching their heads.
Documentation is great, but its main aim should be to detail the outcome required, why it's required and any unique situations that the reader should be aware of.
Some bureaucracy are random stops, others are brakes.
- accountability. We need to know who did what, so we need to store a bunch of information about access and authorization. We want to know who is responsible for stuff, so some gatekeeping is necessary.
- fairness. It shouldn't matter who approaches the org, they need to be treated according to the merits of their case and not their status.
- throughput. We have a bureaucracy because a bunch of people need to be served. Read between the lines and we also mean cheaply.
- latency. They need to be served soon, otherwise what's the point?
- longevity. We don't want the system collapsing just because one or two civil servants leave. It needs to not be fragile.
- user friendly. People come to the desk, they want a driver's license, they don't want to do a bunch of stuff with forms.
As Bender said, gimme your biggest, strongest, cheapest drink.
So, out of sheer spite, they decided that should mean "the slowest, least responsive, least friendly thing ever so people give up and piss off" :D
Also helps a lot of "fixers" who work in the system, get paid government wages and want to make some actual money.
Bureaucracy is the reason long term congressmen and senators are all multi millionaires. It's also the reason why people who work on the military procurement programs end up getting coshy jobs at firms like Raytheon after they are done servicing the public. I rarely go a day without seeing an example of this effect in action.
- accountability: bureaucracies allow people to hind behind process and anonymity to shirk basically all responsibility.
- fairness: bureaucratic systems are usually designed with a particular type of person in mind and if you don't fit that mold, it will be hard to accomplish anything.
- throughput and latency: I don't even have to write anything here.
- longevity: this is something bureaucracies are actually good at -- propagating themselves.
- user friendliness: yeaah.
After computers, the rules became far more complex and it seemed no clerk I dealt with actually understood them. Their solution was to lie - to select and misinterpret a few of the actual rules to create a fantasy rule system that made their interactions simple; but also utterly false. Very frustrating, and so far as I can tell, that's how things still are. The police are maybe the worst 'cause they are hard pressed and forced to cut corners (while managing a lot of rules); but it's everywhere.
- making the digital process more complicated than the paper process, because the software will simplify the complexity (it does until it doesn’t and then everyone involved needs to figure out the real process anyway)
- assuming correctness of the software (all software has bugs, all digital processes eventually get into a broken state, there should be a way to force the system back into an intuitive “right” state better than some dev running random sql statements on a production database)
- assuming correctness of the software’s users (all people make mistakes, and mistakes happen often, there should be a clean and reliable way to force a process into a state matching reality when someone misclicks, but often the only way is to “lie” to the system and take an odd path through it)
- trying to capture the process end to end in software rules causing it to become set in stone (only the labor intensive parts should be automated, leaving room for flexible adaptation of the process without requiring a new software release)
As computers became more widespread, unfortunately some tried to emulate this approach at smaller offices, regardless "progress" was made until computers are everywhere.
Somewhere along the line from the depths of bureaucracy came the saying "To err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer".
And this maxim has been emblazoned on coffee cups for decades now.
It is not nostalgia for paper: technology was applied badly to bureaucracy, widening the divide between the physical, in-person bureaucrat and the person using their service. When things were not digital, at least, it was easy to deal with things in person, talk, get explanations.
In practice, automation just means that we do more work.
This applies to bureaucracies also.
That's not how "bureaucracies" seem to actually function in the real world though, regardless of the theory. ;)
I imagine this similar to how software developers may be new to a particular project or codebase but may still bring with them general domain knowledge which lets them understand the project requirements or the intricacies of the codebase relatively quickly.
— Oscar Wilde
At a certain point things seems to work and became habits, a newcomer might understand them, might not, might spot illogical/inefficient aspects that are assumed as normal due to the initial evolutionary process and ANY confrontation is such stages typically generate frictions and uncertain feelings where many choose to contour with extra rigidity.
Said that, play network analysis that way seems a bit a nonsense to me. We try to simply things, reduce them to something we already know but... We actually know companies/works paradigms and policies MUCH more than network theory in general.
