The Magic of Re-reinventing Government
By John Mecklin
Miller-McKune
A report titled "One Trillion Reasons" lays out seven "commercially proven best practices" for maximizing productivity, and it claims the federal government could save $1 trillion by 2020 if they were adopted.
Last summer I got pick-pocketed in Chicago. I was walking back to my hotel room after dinner when, mid-block, I reached down, found nothing where my wallet should have been and went straight to panic mode. Thanks to FedEx and my passport, I was able to make it onto an airplane and back to the West Coast, where the pocket-picking gave me a delayed lesson in governmental competence, via the seemingly simple and parallel tasks of replacing a Social Security card and a driver’s license.
The Social Security office in Santa Barbara, Calif., is located in an outdoor mall downtown, but it’s not at ground level, where most shops are, but around a corner, up a winding stairwell, around another corner or two and down a hallway carpeted in purple. As you enter the fluorescent-lit but somehow cave-like waiting room, a sign tells you to take a ticket; the sign has an arrow but doesn’t point to anything specific. If you happen to notice it, a computer monitor on a table, way down at waist level, does offer three explanations of how to obtain the proper ticket. But you have to bend over and read all the way through before you can understand. Many people do not understand but spin around, looking this way and that, until a squat guard extracted from a Gabriel García Márquez novel and placed behind a nearby table explains the procedure.
The waiting cave has four rectangular openings in one of its walls, each of which can be closed with a wooden panel that slides up and down. When I got there, the panels were up at two of the openings, and citizens sat on chairs before them, receiving super-slo-mo government attention. Six or so other people waited their turns on chairs specially designed to make older people ache. A mechanical gizmo on the wall displayed the number being served, but it behaved erratically; it would stay on one number for eons, and then inexplicably jump two or three or four.
(Original, with hot links, here.)
Miller-McKune
A report titled "One Trillion Reasons" lays out seven "commercially proven best practices" for maximizing productivity, and it claims the federal government could save $1 trillion by 2020 if they were adopted.
Last summer I got pick-pocketed in Chicago. I was walking back to my hotel room after dinner when, mid-block, I reached down, found nothing where my wallet should have been and went straight to panic mode. Thanks to FedEx and my passport, I was able to make it onto an airplane and back to the West Coast, where the pocket-picking gave me a delayed lesson in governmental competence, via the seemingly simple and parallel tasks of replacing a Social Security card and a driver’s license.
The Social Security office in Santa Barbara, Calif., is located in an outdoor mall downtown, but it’s not at ground level, where most shops are, but around a corner, up a winding stairwell, around another corner or two and down a hallway carpeted in purple. As you enter the fluorescent-lit but somehow cave-like waiting room, a sign tells you to take a ticket; the sign has an arrow but doesn’t point to anything specific. If you happen to notice it, a computer monitor on a table, way down at waist level, does offer three explanations of how to obtain the proper ticket. But you have to bend over and read all the way through before you can understand. Many people do not understand but spin around, looking this way and that, until a squat guard extracted from a Gabriel García Márquez novel and placed behind a nearby table explains the procedure.
The waiting cave has four rectangular openings in one of its walls, each of which can be closed with a wooden panel that slides up and down. When I got there, the panels were up at two of the openings, and citizens sat on chairs before them, receiving super-slo-mo government attention. Six or so other people waited their turns on chairs specially designed to make older people ache. A mechanical gizmo on the wall displayed the number being served, but it behaved erratically; it would stay on one number for eons, and then inexplicably jump two or three or four.
(Original, with hot links, here.)
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