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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Kirk © who wrote (18984)5/23/2024 10:13:47 AM
From: Sun Tzu  Respond to of 27216
 
Thank you! That is another good example. There are also good examples in HMOs and hospital operators. The same can be said for the banks in 2008. That was one of the things that really turned me off about Obama.

The bottom line is that corporate responsibility is no substitute for individual accountability. Treating corporations as people allows the execs to engage in shortsighted risky behavior and collect huge bonuses with minimal consequences for their wrongdoing.

And in case someone thinks it is hard to keep track, I can tell you that it is not. In my work was routinely asked to provide justification for decisions that I made years ago. And I could always go back to the email trails and meeting minutes to provide context for why and how we made the choices that we did. My work was engineering and architecture, but it was always mingled with a lot of business issues, legal requirements, and logistics. So a question such as "why didn't we upgrade our routers to X back in July of 2011" could have answers ranging from "we didn't have the resources to man the upgrade while also building legal compliance apps" to "At the time our datacenter lease was coming to an end and we didn't have the time to test a class of routers in time to make them production ready in the new DC" or to simply "we relied on the opinion of platform owner for the most cost effective solution."

When corporations care about something, they keep meticulous audit trails. We didn't just keep track of decisions. We also tracked who generated what file and how it crossed departmental boundaries. And it was, for the most parts, well automated without causing undue burden on anyone.

So in your example, there should be lots of audit trail as to why budget was not allocated to maintenance and what role different people played in the disaster. We cannot have a system where people can enrich themselves by causing harm to others without repercussions because they are hiding behind the corporate shield.