
The corporate "buckets of money" problem - llambda
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/02/10/buckets/
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CoolGuySteve
Nice term. I've always noticed the problem, where a minor to mediocre win for
one team massively inconveniences the entire firm by a little bit.

I briefly worked at a bank once where email searching was disabled in Outlook
and would not be re-enabled no matter how many times you phoned them up. This
must have been a huge win for the tech guys and their support burden or
security concerns, but in the meantime, I couldn't find shit. I was seriously
hobbled in my day to day activities, If I didn't find an important email and
flag/archive it immediately upon receipt, it would get lost in the daily
deluge and I'd have to ask someone to forward it to me a week down the road.

It was a fucking debacle. I seriously hope whoever made that decision got
fired, there is no excuse for that level of incompetence.

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jacques_chester
This is pretty standard economics. Large command-and-control organisations
develop remarkable pathologies because it's basically impossible to have a
single set of objectives for any reasonably complex system of interacting
agents.

But so long as the "transaction cost" remains lower in the command structure
than in dealing with the market, stuff is done inhouse.

Then mix in the oddities which come from how budgeting works and you get
situations like these. Nobody really has a good fix. There are _better_ ways
of doing things (or at least, _different_ ways with different mixes of
drawbacks), but not necessarily an optimal solution.

