Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Stuck on QWERTY row

Megan McArdle looks at why fixing the VA will be hard - processes started through the years resist reform and change.
What that means in plain English is that when you put reforms in place, you can’t just rip out the stuff that’s not working and do something different. What you’re actually reforming is the process, and because many of the current elements of the process are functionally mandated by other government rules, or court rulings, or bits of legislation that your reform effort didn’t amend, you have to layer your reform on top of the system you wanted to reform, rather than in place of it. Many of your reforms simply stack another layer of bureaucracy on top of the bureaucracy that was already causing problems. This is a problem that CEOs don’t face, unless they’re in some heavily regulated business such as banking or oil refining.
QWERTY remains the standard years after the last metal arms struck paper on a typewriter.
It takes so much more than talk to fix a broken system.
Which is why Obama has struggled making his promises reality.

1 comment:

Mike aka Proof said...

I found it interesting that on the old Battlestar Galactica, on the extreme far side of the galaxy, humans used the exact same qwerty keyboard! What are the odds??