Sunday, September 14, 2008

Governance lessons from System Architecture

Frequent terrorist acivities in the country have created a widespread panic among people and has sabotaged the peaceful development process in the country.

The brighter part of these blasts is that we as a country have matured over the period of time. It is not hard to remember that in not so distant past such activities would cast its shadows in seemingly unrelated parts of the country for e.g. a blast in Mumbai would call for heavy deployment of police forces in Varanasi because of expected communal tension in the city. Today, terrorists have grossly failed to create such disharmony among various communities and related distrust. This has largely relieved the administration to focus on public safety and welfare rather than creating walls within the city to protect them from each other.

From systems perspective I find an oft repeated 'Stove-Pipe' anti-pattern found commonly in enterprise systems, where the high level vision and policies are not implemented properly. It is common understanding that there are myriad of agencies at center ans state level which largely or entirely restricts the flow of information within the organization to up-down through lines of control but inhibits or prevents cross agency communication. This leads to duplication of effort and, in extreme cases, unhealthy competition between different agencies. It is high time we shed our stove-pipe mindset to bring efficiency and answerability into the governance. With the sixth pay commission in place there could be no better time to introduce a culture of openness and supportive style of administration among agencies and their relation with common citizens.

Also, I take this opportunity to state my views unequivocally that we need;
  • to entrust our policing agencies with greater power (stringent laws) to help them help us.
  • to make them answerable and courteous to citizens, so that the common citizen is not afraid to ask for help from them.
  • to provide elaborate safety net for the welfare of police families.
  • to give respect and decorate our policing staff at par with defense services to boost their morale.
May peace be with us.

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