Comments on: Integrity, Validity or Security: Pick Any Two

By: Mark Chubb

Mark Chubb — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:56:55 +0000

Bill, your comment raises an important point underlying my concern. What you seem to have encouraged among your young colleagues was an enduring commitment to reflective practice. I fear that our immersion in a steady stream of information coming at us like the flow from a fire hydrant encourages too many of us to try and consume more rather than sip carefully. We often overlook the opportunity costs of consuming information even if we appreciate the transaction costs.

Phil’s question strikes at the core of my concern. Has the commodification of information encouraged a culture of consumption that overlooks the fundamental question of value? I fear it has or is in the process of doing so.

Those who questioned the city’s response came from both of Phil’s perspectives: Some were concerned that the city had become too concerned with economic and technical concerns to be relied upon to care for much less respond to the public good, which they reckoned required us to notify everyone at once. Others quite clearly responded as customers who were unhappy that the quality of the product was compromised and that they were not informed directly by a responsible official willing to accept responsibility and apologize for the inconvenience.

As the city has responded to new drinking water mandates in recent years, citizens and officials have debated the wisdom of covering the city’s reservoirs. Arguments against this proposition took two main forms: 1) this would be a needless expense in a city blessed with an abundant supply of surprisingly clean drinking water and 2) this represents a capitulation to the culture of fear arising after 9/11.

Today, as the city comes to realize that Canadians (geese), not Muslim extremists, are poisoning their drinking water with biological agents, their perceptions seem to be changing, albeit slowly.

By: William R. Cumming

William R. Cumming — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:50:40 +0000

Another excellent post raising practical and theoretical questions about the IT world. I trained over 30-40 young lawyers in my time as a supervisor for a federal agency. The first one on one meeting between me and them involved my briefing them on several issues. But the first was the nature of lawyering itself. I took the position, which I clearly believed then and now, was that lawyers provided information, hopefully highly accurate, to clients based on their training, education, and experience. But I stated that they would be supervised by me and tested for evaluation on another facet of lawyering. Specifically, I stated that many competent Law Librarians and Para-legals could often provide even more up-to-date and accurate information. So how did the lawyering job differ. I said you are really being paid for you judgement. And as a supervisor I thought that their career or personality or training, education, experience elsewhere made me confident of their basic good lawyering judgement and that I hoped it would improve over time. Every lawyer I supervised without fail went on to bigger and better jobs than I ever held in the federal government. But many would always come back to me and reminisce about that first one-on-one. And I did not expect perfection. Sometimes the most ardous and difficult case even with adverse outcomes teachs the best.

Why this comment? Many disciplines have much to offer the world of HS and EM. It is in fact why those fields so interest me. And clearly the knowledge base of each discipline is quite different or even totally different. So it is alway fascinating to find out how different disciplines process the same information. It is the integration of those knowledge bases that is so important for the decision maker. The problem of course is how to process the judgements of different people in a crisis or emergency. Note that almost NO Top Officals actually ended up playing the TOPOFF series of Exercises or even now the first National Level Exercise and almost no reportage of lessons learned. A distinguished Professor of Public Administration early in this century wrote a truly wonderful article about how the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security generally needed to be both a learning organization and to develop processes to learn from its mistakes. I still view HS and EM as bottom up systems and processes. But we continue to see secretive, non-transparent, and authoritarian management in these areas. One of the reasons to delegate both authority and accountablility in crisis management is that then if mistakes are made, which they will be, the damage is at least somewhat localized. Why doesn’t FEMA which process 50-90 disasters declared by the President each year have a lessons-learned report for each real world disaster? Perhaps other components of DHS also have real world events of every scale. Some perhaps the Coast Guard may already have processes in place to learn from those real world operations. My bottom line of course is that just because someone is recruited into DHS does not mean that even with the training, experience, or education, they will have “Gravitas” and judgement in a crisis. And some may just be beyond their best years to operate under stress for 24/7/365 on and on. The emergency response sector is remarkably thin even on the first line and believe me no one operates well with no sleep for 24-36 hours. Social media is another complexity added to the information base but it certainly is not designed to improve judgement calls. Great thread and comments.

By: Philip J. Palin

Philip J. Palin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:16:30 +0000

In regard to the e coli finding, given the public response you observed up close, can you characterize the public response as that of:

A. Citizens: Partners in civic governance, individuals who, in mindful association with others, assume a shared responsibility for a defined place and polity.

B. Consumers: Individuals expecting to receive a product or service consistent with what he or she has paid.

I am — transparently — setting up an argument and you don’t have to play along. I would welcome other characterizations or explanations.

But I sometimes wonder if in trying to satisfy a consumer-oriented attitude we are not feeding a monster that may eventually devour the republic.