The Fuel of Bureaucracy
A thriving bureaucracy lives on information. Bureaucracies take in new data, validate data and create new data. It is the life cycle of bureaucracy. Sadly, the data part of bureaucracy is usually quite downstream of the value that the bureaucracy is meant to provide.
Bureaucracies don't make much of a distinction between data that adds value and data that adds data. On the surface, more data seems like it would enable an organization to be more efficient and effective.
Yet, every extra piece of data that is collected is just one more chance to get something wrong that needs to be corrected.
When data systems were not connected, mistakes were contained to just a few systems. They may have been hard to correct, but at least they were isolated. In the connected world, mistakes cascade and it is almost impossible to correct at the source.
While duplication of the same data across systems is irritating, there are reasons why it is beneficial in terms of isolation. However, we seem to be living in the worst of both worlds.
Systems that duplicate data and systems that sync data…You get all of the risks of an integrated system and very little of the benefit.