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**Drugmachine** · 12-03-2005, 07:00 AM

I agree. Maybe the Administration should mothball The Homeland Security Agency along with the State Dept and put the funds into another tax break for the rich.

That depends on whether you think it's a useful endevor or not. I tend to look at the DHS in terms of any large synthetic bureaucracy. It exists for a lot of reasons that are not obvious nor do they have to do with the job at hand. The DHS was created as a crisis management response to a discrete series of events. It didn't really create anything new. What it did was reorganize most of the other branches and services in the government and subsumed a lot of them into an uber-agency.

Now there are many reasons to do this: control, authority, accountability, budget efficiency, turf, and a few more I can't think of. Then what you have is a very large very unwieldy organization that starts to look like a hostile takeover not of 1 company but of 34 companies. In other words DHS was formed out of 9-11 and because there was not an extra 30 billion dollars laying around they simply took monies from all those other agencies and branches and slapped together something which if you look at it rationally shouldn't and probably doesn't operate all that well. They're not using more/better/different tools to look at different information. They're using the same people, processes and tools to look at the same information. How does anyone know what's a worthy candidate for information? And then it gets channeled to a new top level management who puts whatever spin they need on it. This is indicative of an extremely fragile organization which could be very prone to inward-looking groupthink.

Before the DHS there was no forum for any alert in any service branch to bubble out to the public and that was probably frowned upon anyway as a matter of internal policy. Now that we have a DHS we have an 'information portal' as it were but the problem is that it communicates in what we used to call context-free or dimensionless variables. We are told "Something is bad" and there is no way to evaluate that in context or understand what "Orange" really means. Maybe it's bad, maybe it's just interesting, maybe we don't know if they know what they're talking about. The very nature of this makes that impossible to know or evaluate. Is today's Orange worse than last week's Orange? Should I look out for swarthy fellows? What constitutes 'suspicious' activities. Well I can tell you that John Ashcroft would say that not looking for suspicious people is itself a suspicious activity.

And at the end of this now we conclude that the very intelligence agencies which are responsible to the DHS for funneling it raw and processed information need to be aligned the same way and they need to be reorganized under an similar uber-agency. That because seemingly the output of these agencies is flawed, politicized, missing, inept we're going to make a yet larger bureaucracy rearranging all those little pieces around so that they do basically the same job for different bosses.

My God no one reads Harvard B-School case studies, do they? This is a corporate strategic failure waiting to occur. The key to creating good information is letting responsible people develop it and not slamming all these disparate cultures together in the hope that magically they will cross fertilize each other. The key to determining which chunks of information are accurate, important, worthy and actionable is to analyze them together but to get several different isolated groups to do it at the same time. Then and only then can someone evaluate the results and determine a real course of action. And if there is a real course of action, something concrete only then should they bother with telling the public anything. An alert from DHS should be a special event that people pay attention to. Not something on the crawl at the bottom of the newschannel screen. It should be rare, significant but importantly it should suggest something real that people can do or respond to.

12-03-2005, 07:00 AM	#2
Drugmachine Join Date Apr 2006 Posts 4,490 Senior Member	I agree. Maybe the Administration should mothball The Homeland Security Agency along with the State Dept and put the funds into another tax break for the rich. That depends on whether you think it's a useful endevor or not. I tend to look at the DHS in terms of any large synthetic bureaucracy. It exists for a lot of reasons that are not obvious nor do they have to do with the job at hand. The DHS was created as a crisis management response to a discrete series of events. It didn't really create anything new. What it did was reorganize most of the other branches and services in the government and subsumed a lot of them into an uber-agency. Now there are many reasons to do this: control, authority, accountability, budget efficiency, turf, and a few more I can't think of. Then what you have is a very large very unwieldy organization that starts to look like a hostile takeover not of 1 company but of 34 companies. In other words DHS was formed out of 9-11 and because there was not an extra 30 billion dollars laying around they simply took monies from all those other agencies and branches and slapped together something which if you look at it rationally shouldn't and probably doesn't operate all that well. They're not using more/better/different tools to look at different information. They're using the same people, processes and tools to look at the same information. How does anyone know what's a worthy candidate for information? And then it gets channeled to a new top level management who puts whatever spin they need on it. This is indicative of an extremely fragile organization which could be very prone to inward-looking groupthink. Before the DHS there was no forum for any alert in any service branch to bubble out to the public and that was probably frowned upon anyway as a matter of internal policy. Now that we have a DHS we have an 'information portal' as it were but the problem is that it communicates in what we used to call context-free or dimensionless variables. We are told "Something is bad" and there is no way to evaluate that in context or understand what "Orange" really means. Maybe it's bad, maybe it's just interesting, maybe we don't know if they know what they're talking about. The very nature of this makes that impossible to know or evaluate. Is today's Orange worse than last week's Orange? Should I look out for swarthy fellows? What constitutes 'suspicious' activities. Well I can tell you that John Ashcroft would say that not looking for suspicious people is itself a suspicious activity. And at the end of this now we conclude that the very intelligence agencies which are responsible to the DHS for funneling it raw and processed information need to be aligned the same way and they need to be reorganized under an similar uber-agency. That because seemingly the output of these agencies is flawed, politicized, missing, inept we're going to make a yet larger bureaucracy rearranging all those little pieces around so that they do basically the same job for different bosses. My God no one reads Harvard B-School case studies, do they? This is a corporate strategic failure waiting to occur. The key to creating good information is letting responsible people develop it and not slamming all these disparate cultures together in the hope that magically they will cross fertilize each other. The key to determining which chunks of information are accurate, important, worthy and actionable is to analyze them together but to get several different isolated groups to do it at the same time. Then and only then can someone evaluate the results and determine a real course of action. And if there is a real course of action, something concrete only then should they bother with telling the public anything. An alert from DHS should be a special event that people pay attention to. Not something on the crawl at the bottom of the newschannel screen. It should be rare, significant but importantly it should suggest something real that people can do or respond to.
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