Incident Management

Most medium sized and large companies deploy "Incident Management" systems to record errors and failures in the daily operations of their IT systems. In fact the recording of errors and deficiencies has become almost routine. Incident management has become an accepted part of information technology or information services. There is now big money to be made in providing organisations with incident management software and services. This is a big waste of money and resources because a large number of incidents should not be occurring in the first place. Incidents should be reduced to enable simple "pen and paper" administration. An incident should be a very rare exception not a regular occurrence.

I do not expect many people to agree with me, but if you have so many errors and deficiencies that you have to deploy specialised software and services, to administer them, then something is seriously wrong. There has been a failure in some or all of the following: the original definition of the business requirement, the analysis and design of the system, the design of the man machine interface, training ,education and testing. In other words you have a big quality control problem. You might also need to need at your quality assurance.

I recently read some incident management procedures which included twelve categories of errors. This is almost farcical.

Incident management systems do nothing , of course, to fix the basic problems . They do, however, divert the attention of management from resolving the real failures. Organisations become buried underneath the statistics relating to problems which should not exist in the first place. This is all a symptom of gross inefficiency.

The original promise of Data Processing or Information Technology was to improve business administration: to improve the work flow and reduce errors to a minimum or eliminate them altogether. We could then free up human resources for decision making and creative activities. This should have been achievable if we had used our brains to critically examine work processes and the methods by which we analyse , design , program and test IT solutions.

Correcting something that has gone wrong is much more expensive that doing the right thing in the first place. In other words prevention is better than cure. It is time for all organisations to do something about it.

Humanity in Management

This week the Commission on Improving Dignity in Care for Older people made a report that made recommendations to improve the care of old people in hospitals and the British National Health Service. Even though the commission was given a rather pompous name it raised some strong points. One of the most important of which is that older people are not treated with the respect, compassion and dignity that they deserve. Despite all the controls, management procedures and checklists extant in modern organisations something has gone wrong.

I posit that amongst all the controls and checklists we have forgotten our humanity and people are being treated like the computers that control our lives. A computer could not care less how you converse with it or treat it for that matter. It is just a machine that should be serving the will of the humans that created them. It is a tool which can make an organisation run very effectively if used properly. But when the machine is misused to create unnecessary bureaucracy it can clog up the "oxygen system" of the administration to create mindless systems which serve little or no purpose.

This is not just happening in the National Health Service and the caring professions it is happening everywhere. It is as if the system is being run by people who as so burdened by bureaucracy they have forgotten their humanity. It is time to re-educate ourselves and set an example to the very young in our schools of the importance of putting people first and the machine second.

We need to solve these problems not just by imposing further rules about how we talk to one another but how we act towards one another. Let the human beings be treated as sentient beings and the computers be treated as just machines and not the masters which are there to control us. Information Technology could then free all of us up to lead healthier and more constructive lives.

Paying lip service to improvements by trying to control the language we use will not really help. I would quite happily swap being called an "old boy" for a first class health service that met my needs. Action first followed by the niceties of politeness. You are what you do not what you say.