The cost of too many top priorities

You'd think that a recession--i.e. a real crisis--would make folks take a step back, draw a breath and triage priorities. But, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, that's not at all the case, be it a recession or other "challenge," to use the tortured pidgin of Corporatespeak.

Case in point: Someone I know through work spent a significant chunk of time setting up a test cloud computing environment--time that could have been spent actually doing his job, which is keeping the I/T infrastructure humming along on a shorter-than-usual shoe string. Why? Because customers (and potential customers) for his company's SAAS ("Software as a Service") application insisted that it have more uptime than the company could support by hosting it on their own servers. Now, I know enough about the software in question to know that it is quite useful within its niche. But there is absolutely no way that it could be mistaken for "mission-critical." Bluntly put, the client's representative was inflating their fiefdom's--and thus their own--importance.

Now rewind, if you will, about ten years to the Y2K run-up. I was working as a tech. writer at a tech. company whose name you'd recognize. It took the Powers That Be until the middle of second quarter of 1999 to hand down the decree that we--meaning the documentation folks--shouldn't have to worry about being on call for New Year's Eve and Day. Which, to any rational person, should be a no-brainer, but that's what a company run by lawyers and bean-counters (in that order) will do. One of the graphics folks got big laughs at that announcement, mocking the Y2K doomsday scenario: "Somehow I just can't imagine someone calling tech. support: 'My computer doesn't work! I need art!'"

Bottom line: The "hard choices" that our "leaders" like to invoke during the tough times are really always with us. It is their job--to0 often abdicated--to set priorities. Insisting that "it's all critical" is one thing if you're launching a space shuttle or running a nuclear power plant, and even those have margins of error baked in. Anyone who cannot do that has no business managing her/himself, much less assuming any responsibility for the capital and livelihoods of other people.