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The corporate "buckets of money" problem
- CoolGuySteve 14y agoNice term. I've always noticed the problem, where a minor to mediocre win for one team massively inconveniences the entire firm by a little bit. I briefly worked at a bank once where email searching was disabled in Outlook and would not be re-enabled no matter how many times you phoned them up. This must have been a huge win for the tech guys and their support burden or security concerns, but in the meantime, I couldn't find shit. I was seriously hobbled in my day to day activities, If I didn't find an important email and flag/archive it immediately upon receipt, it would get lost in the daily deluge and I'd have to ask someone to forward it to me a week down the road. It was a fucking debacle. I seriously hope whoever made that decision got fired, there is no excuse for that level of incompetence.
- jacques_chester 14y agoThis is pretty standard economics. Large command-and-control organisations develop remarkable pathologies because it's basically impossible to have a single set of objectives for any reasonably complex system of interacting agents. But so long as the "transaction cost" remains lower in the command structure than in dealing with the market, stuff is done inhouse. Then mix in the oddities which come from how budgeting works and you get situations like these. Nobody really has a good fix. There are better ways of doing things (or at least, different ways with different mixes of drawbacks), but not necessarily an optimal solution.