On the Mobbu blog recently, we wrote The Long Now of government IT, which offers some notes on how to write proposals for technology-based services that run for 20+ years, and advises not to design 2030’s IT in 2006!
We need to design the data to be extremely permanent if it needs to be kept over the course of the contract. This implies a focus upon resilience and archiving—additionally, the contract negotiation phase should make clear when historic data may be safely erased. We don’t yet know what kind of views we’ll need over the data when it’s a pile 17+ years deep.
Conversely, we should design the components to be extremely replaceable. For instance, there should be sufficient abstraction that we can swap out different components and levels of the solution (eg user interface, databases, infrastructure, application architecture, and so on) as we discover new needs or better ways to do things, or when a new database or data format is mandated at some point in the future.
I ended up heading off on quite a tangent, thinking about long-term organisations and imagining what we'd design if the contract was actually for 250 or 2,500 years rather than 25 or so.
What organisations have longevity? Universities and religions often have better longevity than companies (though sadly, number one on this list of the longest-running family companies has folded; and equally sadly, the famous story about New College Oxford growing oaks specifically to replace its dining hall's structural beams seems apochryphal). Long-surviving religions have the strange but resilient quality of hardly ever being identified with the contexts that they operate in - like the ethnicity/geography/history/culture/political ideology; yet they're still being able to use those contexts to enrich themselves.
Would we design a religion to run this contract?! A religion whose faith and ritual would be oriented around delivering the service. It's an amusing idea, but we know that ceremony and ritual themselves change (see cargo cults and catastrophe fiction for extreme examples). So it might have to be a religion that folded the measurement of its own methods against unwavering goals into its doctrines and religious education. That is to say, the KPIs would have to keep an eye on and correct the KPIs. Difficult...
Let this quote ripped from Eliot's Choruses from The Rock to serve as a caution:
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock
But it would be interesting to design an organisation around mechanisms that take advantage of those human universals that do seem to be persistant, like curiosity...
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