Public sin, private vices
Large tracts of the planet's remaining rain forests continue to be at risk from the national addiction to bureaucracy and the obsession with a text-based society. The dead hand of bureaucracy indulging in an orgy of pointless tasks absorbs the energy of more than a million pairs of hands and consumes approximately 1% of GDP. It is in all probability a substantial understatement, since it does not include hidden costs associated with atrophy in the courts, investment driven out by killjoys in government pay and losses to the legitimate economy caused by entrepreneurs constructing black and grey bypasses around intrusive, suffocating officialdom. Say 2% sapped from GDP (which totals €198 billion), and we shall be nearer the mark.
But wait: that is a calculation which applies only to the legions of the state. There is another, painful affliction of bureaucracy of society which appears from the direction one would least expect to find it - the private sector.
One has only to observe the patience-consuming task of opening a bank account, even in a smart foreign bank, to appreciate in an instant that the dazzling array of computers and apparent IT back-up facilities are to a large extent an iluzja. The clerks (who might just as well be on the government's payroll) have no intuitive trust in information technology, nor is there an apparent management encouragement to drag them and their activities away from reliance on paper culture and manual document storage. So the fresh customer, having originally been impressed by the flicker of fingers dancing across the keyboard, soon resumes the old currency of signing and re-signing a dozen or so paper documents. The computer network, based upon these observations, is primarily there to generate materials for subsequent physical retrieval and not to eradicate text-based, productivity-consuming activities.
What is it that brings about this dedication to constructing paper mountains which appears to defeat even investors from abroad, who turn prisoners of the system instead of creating a revolution? One answer lies in the evolution of society. The IT revolution in the west was already well into early middle age by the time the country was suddenly plunged into it in 1990 and thereafter. Almost no-one had been trained to handle these new systems, and a whole section of society was already doomed never to become computer-literate. Coupled to which this had always been a compulsively obsessive record-keeping society, as a means of exerting social coercion as much as anything else, during the Partitions as well as under the wartime occupations and post-war sovietised interlude. We are on the receiving end of an ingrained bureaucratised tradition which stretches back more than 200 years.
What this means is that there is almost a genetic distrust of electronic records and storage systems and a distinct preference for tangible ones: contracts, papers, receipts, in duplicate and multiplicate. Anywhere in the country it is possible to see capable software management systems lying idle while expensive hardware is deployed to tell the user which document is stored in which file and on what shelf. The national railway company was given equipment to electronically monitor the movement of trains: following installation, the same clerks remained in all the control centres continuing to laboriously plot the passage of each train on graph paper with pencil and ruler. The explanation offered: a computer could never rival the human mind.
The private sector may also plead, with conviction, that double record keeping is essential in order to interface with the state sector, which has to the largest extent stubbornly resisted conversion to the IT age. Computerisation in government offices, where it exists, cannot be relied upon through lack of competent operators (good ones are not going to be attracted by the penurious levels of pay) and, not infrequently, installation of the wrong systems in the first place, in the absence of genuine competition. These are unquestionably qualifying factors, but nowhere more than in government agencies is revulsion toward (any) modern management systems more openly demonstrated. The mismatch with the private sector is akin to the Middle Ages trying to understand what is going on in the 21st century.
One other factor remains, perhaps the least attractive one: that paper records retain their supremacy for fear of employees interfering with electronic records with criminal intent. Dishonesty in commerce, in the forms of pilfering and theft, is a feature of every modern society, but it is excessively prevalent here not least because of the inordinate imbalances between the various levels of reward and exposure to temptation: it is to a large extent what drives the plague of corruption across society.
And yet, for all these explanations, the private sector in the end deserves the stricture of failing to lead the information revolution in this country. To be converted to traditional and backward-looking local practices is the opposite of what is required to achieve a modern European state. The private sector needs to demand the co-operation of government in adopting to modern administrative technology, and there must now be, to match it, a nationwide campaign by the entire business community for a "bonfire of the insanities" - a wholesale clear out of useless bureaucracy and regulations which make about 70% of all paper-chasing entirely pointless in any event.
But private commerce must set a clear example by putting its own house in order, and rely upon the gifts of an electronic society in a perpetual state of exciting renewal, as opposed to a bureaucratic system in terminal decay.
But wait: that is a calculation which applies only to the legions of the state. There is another, painful affliction of bureaucracy of society which appears from the direction one would least expect to find it - the private sector.
One has only to observe the patience-consuming task of opening a bank account, even in a smart foreign bank, to appreciate in an instant that the dazzling array of computers and apparent IT back-up facilities are to a large extent an iluzja. The clerks (who might just as well be on the government's payroll) have no intuitive trust in information technology, nor is there an apparent management encouragement to drag them and their activities away from reliance on paper culture and manual document storage. So the fresh customer, having originally been impressed by the flicker of fingers dancing across the keyboard, soon resumes the old currency of signing and re-signing a dozen or so paper documents. The computer network, based upon these observations, is primarily there to generate materials for subsequent physical retrieval and not to eradicate text-based, productivity-consuming activities.
What is it that brings about this dedication to constructing paper mountains which appears to defeat even investors from abroad, who turn prisoners of the system instead of creating a revolution? One answer lies in the evolution of society. The IT revolution in the west was already well into early middle age by the time the country was suddenly plunged into it in 1990 and thereafter. Almost no-one had been trained to handle these new systems, and a whole section of society was already doomed never to become computer-literate. Coupled to which this had always been a compulsively obsessive record-keeping society, as a means of exerting social coercion as much as anything else, during the Partitions as well as under the wartime occupations and post-war sovietised interlude. We are on the receiving end of an ingrained bureaucratised tradition which stretches back more than 200 years.
What this means is that there is almost a genetic distrust of electronic records and storage systems and a distinct preference for tangible ones: contracts, papers, receipts, in duplicate and multiplicate. Anywhere in the country it is possible to see capable software management systems lying idle while expensive hardware is deployed to tell the user which document is stored in which file and on what shelf. The national railway company was given equipment to electronically monitor the movement of trains: following installation, the same clerks remained in all the control centres continuing to laboriously plot the passage of each train on graph paper with pencil and ruler. The explanation offered: a computer could never rival the human mind.
The private sector may also plead, with conviction, that double record keeping is essential in order to interface with the state sector, which has to the largest extent stubbornly resisted conversion to the IT age. Computerisation in government offices, where it exists, cannot be relied upon through lack of competent operators (good ones are not going to be attracted by the penurious levels of pay) and, not infrequently, installation of the wrong systems in the first place, in the absence of genuine competition. These are unquestionably qualifying factors, but nowhere more than in government agencies is revulsion toward (any) modern management systems more openly demonstrated. The mismatch with the private sector is akin to the Middle Ages trying to understand what is going on in the 21st century.
One other factor remains, perhaps the least attractive one: that paper records retain their supremacy for fear of employees interfering with electronic records with criminal intent. Dishonesty in commerce, in the forms of pilfering and theft, is a feature of every modern society, but it is excessively prevalent here not least because of the inordinate imbalances between the various levels of reward and exposure to temptation: it is to a large extent what drives the plague of corruption across society.
And yet, for all these explanations, the private sector in the end deserves the stricture of failing to lead the information revolution in this country. To be converted to traditional and backward-looking local practices is the opposite of what is required to achieve a modern European state. The private sector needs to demand the co-operation of government in adopting to modern administrative technology, and there must now be, to match it, a nationwide campaign by the entire business community for a "bonfire of the insanities" - a wholesale clear out of useless bureaucracy and regulations which make about 70% of all paper-chasing entirely pointless in any event.
But private commerce must set a clear example by putting its own house in order, and rely upon the gifts of an electronic society in a perpetual state of exciting renewal, as opposed to a bureaucratic system in terminal decay.
