The continuing Brexit shambles reminds me of a row in the approach to Y2K at the large insurer where I was working for IBM. Should a business critical back office system on which the company accounts depended be replaced or made Y2K compliant? I was one of the few people with a deep understanding of both the business and technology, and I had extensive experience of explaining complex problems in a way that allowed senior management to take action. So I was brought in to review the problem and make a recommendation.
One camp insisted that as an insurer they had to manage risk, so Y2K compliance with a more leisurely replacement was the only responsible option. The opposing camp consisted of business managers who had been assigned responsibility for managing new programmes. They would be responsible for a replacement and they insisted they could deliver a new system on time, even though they had no experience of delivering such an application. My investigation showed me they had no grasp of the mix of business and technical complexities, but they firmly believed that waterfall projects could be forced through successfully by charismatic management. All the previous failures were down to “weak management” and “bad luck”. I had seen their style of project management, which entailed bringing everyone together for massed weekly assemblies and shouting at the cynical, disbelieving developers about the need to “keep knocking down those milestones”. Making the old system compliant would be an insult to their competence.
My report pointed out the relative risks and costs of the options. I sold Y2K compliance to the senior manager in charge of the UK Accounts Department, sketching out the implications of the various options on a flipchart in a 30 minute chat so I had agreement before I’d even finished the report. The charismatic crew were furious, but silenced. The old system was Y2K compliant in time. The proposed new one could not have been delivered when it was needed. It would have been sunk by problems with upstream dependencies I was aware of but which the charismatics refused to acknowledge as being relevant.
If the charismatics’ solution had been chosen the company would have lost the use of a business critical application in late 1999. No contingency arrangements would have been possible and the company would have been unable to produce credible reserves, vital for an insurance company’s accounts. The external auditors would have been unable to pass the accounts. The share price would have collapsed and the company would have been sunk. I’m sure the charismatics would have blamed bad luck, and other people. “It was those dependencies, not us. We were let down”. That was a large, public limited company. If my advice had been rejected the people who wanted the old system to be made Y2K compliant would have brought in the internal auditors, who in turn would have escalated their concern to the board’s audit committee if necessary. If there had still been no action they would have taken the matter to the external auditors.
That’s how things should work in a big corporation. Of course they often don’t and the auditors can lose their nerve, or choose to hope that things will work out well. There is at least a mechanism that can be followed if people decide to perform their job responsibly. With Brexit there is a cavalier unwillingness to think about risk and complexity that is reminiscent of those irresponsibly optimistic managers. We are supposed to trust politicians who can offer us nothing more impressive than “trust me” and “it’s their fault” and who are offering no clear contingency arrangements if their cheery optimism proves unfounded. There is a mechanism to hold them to account. That is the responsibility of Parliament. Will the House of Commons step up to the job? We’ll see.
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