It seems to be an age-old experience that given the chance people will wiggle out of obligations and promises as soon as they get the chance. They may have said that they can deliver more than they really can or may have said so to close a deal and never intended to fully deliver the goods.
There are some organizational tactics that support this non-performance, even denial of service. The oldest tricks are what I call the "Tech Support Rule" and the "politician" rule. The first says that if you have a captive audience you can relax your deliveries. The second says that have the best intentions but fail to deliver resources, i.e. funds. In the first. your customers give you power, buy a service contract, and you have them in a captive situation where you can get away with much non-delivery of service. The irony is that the purchaser believes that he is getting more by having the force of the contract to be able to get solutions. Most of the time he is not getting top-notch service. This is why most support operations hire entry-level people. The person can save money overall by spending the time himself to learn how to manage and troubleshoot the system himself. Either he learns this or he terminates the support when he finds even the escalated trouble case does not get him a solution, let alone a timely one. It takes out and out fraud to end these relationships sometimes.
In the case of the politician, the executive or legislator can state the best of intentions and be perceived as having heard of a need, but when the citizens aren't watching, he can non-perform in the budget process by not funding or adequately funding some program he is on record for supporting.
The failure to discharge responsibility or to spend resources appropriate to a solution is a hallmark of organizational operation everywhere. It is manifest in the
complexity of regulations that govern a transaction. As a general rule. the more complex the rules the greater the disadvantage of the individual. Complexity favors big organizations with teams of analysts and the individual client is always at a disadvantage regardless of the stated mission of the service. This is one of the main avenues of power and corruption in government and business. It doesn't matter if the organization is your wirelss provider, a lender, or a government agency such as the Social Security Administration.
Such complexity is often used by legislators not just to thwart fraud, which may cost the government more than actual fraud or prevent efforts at fraud if it actually delivered, but complexity often results in a denial of service. Since ancient times "Jumping through hoops", that is the sequence of petty steps needed to do business with government and also with businesses not in the government, discourages some of the clients presumably served by the offered service, and "Falling through the cracks" is due to either out right failures of the system of services or to disconnects and denial of service based on a lack of persistance,
the attitude being "If you want this bad enough, you have to work for it." It is the oldest trick in existance for a legislator to not adequately fund a program and let the language of the law create a set of barriers to actually delivering on its stated aims. The Politician gets to look good while not actually delivering on the promise. One way for oversight to combat this, is to "Show me the Money", which means that an independent analysis says that the funding meets the goals of the program.
Reagan era politicians loved to attack layers of agencies in government and privatize public programs. Nowadays this is manifest in the large numbers of non profit groups contracted to government. This trades one form of self-interested for another form of self-interested middle man who are less accountable. At least the legilsature could review the mission of an errant agency, now the only check is contract renewal and that is more disconnected from performance. The effectiveness of the relationship between a government agency and the non profit rests on an allignment of the mission statement of the agency and the interests of the non profit. There could be a disconnect. One area in which this middleman relationship leads to bloat and self-interest, just as in managed health-care, is self-interested vending of services and in advocacy created by regulatory complexity. In order for a client to get services, he needs the middleman of the advocacy non-profit to manage the morass of forms and regulations, the complexity designed to prevent fraud and activate denial of service. The client does not know if the middleman is motivated in his service or self-interest and not their own.
The result of all of this is that many people in business and government alike go through the motions of offering and delivering services, but don't really deliver. They are controlled by the complexity of the rules that define their work and because they are often powerless, or have given up the power to actually make sure the service was delivered, they work, but with no attachment to the outcome. This is why some of the glaring failures of services that were supposed to deliver, especially in times of crisis, could occur.
Complexity and its role in denial of service is one of the hallmarks of a decadent society, one destined for revolution. In a society that is supposed to be governed by the rule of law, such a revolution would consist of a reduction of complexity, either by abandoning fixations, such as "How many angles can fit on the head of a pin", or by consciously simplifying the body of law, a Constitutional Conventon, and a purging of case law.
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