marfig
No ROM battery
When I was younger, most of the government infrastructure was still on paper. To get a birth certificate they would usually have to open these large books, search for my name and then type it out on a IBM Selectric typewriter. Thankfully, they had most of it done on pre-formated sheets of paper and would just need to fill in the blanks with my name, my parents and other data.
It was troublesome for any public functionary. And it would usually require a good part of the morning for you to get your birth certificate or to deal with any other public service matter.
Today everything is on servers. Data is easily searched and pulled out immediately. Even the most exotic piece of information can be quickly obtained and usually by quick and immediate cross-checking of other servers on completely different public services. It takes us about 5 seconds between giving our name and the printer to get its order to spew out our birth certificate.
But only when the system is online. When it is not, you get nothing. Where are the books? Well, pray you were born when they wrote it on books. Despite having to travel to your location of birth, you'll get what you want. But if you were born after that, sorry no books. Maybe the system will be back in a few minutes.
The dependency on technology may be our downfall in the long run. A blackout can today stop a city in ways that it couldn't just a few years ago. Tragedies can happen that could wipe out and make it forever unrecoverable essential information. There was a time when things were slow, but ensured. Today things are fast but flimsy. But above all, today your ability to get or not something is dependent not on whether someone wrote it down, but on whether the system is online.
Likewise I worry about what on hell are we doing wrong in the public sector. Anyone on these forums that has ever worked for or dealt with IT departments on the private sector knows very well that 99% is a mediocre guarantee for an online service. This roughly translates to 3 days and a half of downtime in one year. All companies demand from themselves an uptime of 99.9%, 7 hours of downtime in one year. And yet our public services all over the world have the lowest uptime score on the planet, far below the 99% mark. More like 90 or below. With constant connectivity and server issues, one at some point needs to start asking what kind of companies are our governments hiring to maintain their IT infrastruture. What the hell is going on?
Technology is the conundrum of modern societies. We accepted too fast and without thinking communication devices and protocols that offer very little guarantee of success into our most important public services. We will surely one day get over it and our times be remembered as the Paleolithic age of IT. Still, we are confronted by it right now. And the apparent lack of seriousness of how the public sector seems to handle the technological revolution worries me.
It was troublesome for any public functionary. And it would usually require a good part of the morning for you to get your birth certificate or to deal with any other public service matter.
Today everything is on servers. Data is easily searched and pulled out immediately. Even the most exotic piece of information can be quickly obtained and usually by quick and immediate cross-checking of other servers on completely different public services. It takes us about 5 seconds between giving our name and the printer to get its order to spew out our birth certificate.
But only when the system is online. When it is not, you get nothing. Where are the books? Well, pray you were born when they wrote it on books. Despite having to travel to your location of birth, you'll get what you want. But if you were born after that, sorry no books. Maybe the system will be back in a few minutes.
The dependency on technology may be our downfall in the long run. A blackout can today stop a city in ways that it couldn't just a few years ago. Tragedies can happen that could wipe out and make it forever unrecoverable essential information. There was a time when things were slow, but ensured. Today things are fast but flimsy. But above all, today your ability to get or not something is dependent not on whether someone wrote it down, but on whether the system is online.
Likewise I worry about what on hell are we doing wrong in the public sector. Anyone on these forums that has ever worked for or dealt with IT departments on the private sector knows very well that 99% is a mediocre guarantee for an online service. This roughly translates to 3 days and a half of downtime in one year. All companies demand from themselves an uptime of 99.9%, 7 hours of downtime in one year. And yet our public services all over the world have the lowest uptime score on the planet, far below the 99% mark. More like 90 or below. With constant connectivity and server issues, one at some point needs to start asking what kind of companies are our governments hiring to maintain their IT infrastruture. What the hell is going on?
Technology is the conundrum of modern societies. We accepted too fast and without thinking communication devices and protocols that offer very little guarantee of success into our most important public services. We will surely one day get over it and our times be remembered as the Paleolithic age of IT. Still, we are confronted by it right now. And the apparent lack of seriousness of how the public sector seems to handle the technological revolution worries me.
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