The market and democratic systems enable disruptive technologies and systems to challenge the established order and, if it is good enough, entirely replace it. As a recent example the iPod and Bose speakers had totally replaced the old metre high speakers with CD, turntable, radio, cassette type stereo system. Bureaucracy is a different animal though.

From John Robb :

The poor results we get speak for themselves and costs are astronomical. Personally, I don't [think] the CIA or the NSA can be reformed through deck shuffling and coddling. One solution would be to hire Jack Welsh, let him fire 75% of the people already there, and allow him to build a new, functional system from the ground up.

Organisational disruption and replacement in bureaucracy is an internal process which runs in opposition to a bureaucratic form having an internal self-interest in perpetuating its current form. This dampens volatility but also hampers drastic internal re-organisation.

It becomes a political risk in government organisation as well, which further dampens the political desire for drastic change. Competition and self-organisation in the face of internal competitors are important external efficiency arbiters.

Robb is advocating market organisational approaches to government bureacracy - but market companies are easy to judge empirical results. There are a myriad of feedback mechanisms, there isnt with government departments and even less with the more opaque institutions like intelligence.

Until government has transparent feedback mechanisms I cannot see disruptive organisational revisions occurring. Government doesn't need to survive in a market the way a company does, its only concern is ensuring it doesn't fall under negative public opinion that will require political action - such as the Australian Wheat Board faced.

The AWB was darwined, but for a singular incident that was politically repugnant, not because it was uncompetitive or inefficient.

Organisation is a technology choice. Whether it is political, social or economic organisation. Normally the most efficient form of organisation is chosen to serve a particular purpose. Capital intensive industries tend to adopt heavily centralised structures to support their operations. Commoditised industries can support decentralised structures.

The Navy is a good example of a capital intensive industry. A ship takes a lot of money to design, build, man and maintain. Consequently the Navy needs a massive operation to raise the revenues, to fund the process, and over look the process. Navies largely remain the monopoly of nation-states as they have the infrastructure to raise the money through tax to build and support the bureaucracy a Navy needs.

Publishing has become a commoditised industry. There are numerous competitors supplying both paper and digital publishing services and products. An example of this is SSR which is hosted in a basement but has the same web-presence as the New York Times (but not the same audience).

An organisation that wants to compete in the publishing industry has to have a decentralised structure in order to avoid the high overhead of a centralised bureaucratic structure. Centralisation in a commoditised industry makes the organisational form inefficient.

Government is an organisational form which has to respond to pressures in order to maximise its efficiency. The early 20thC was a capital intensive environment. Warfare was capital intensive and between states. Then there was the rise of the welfare state where governments adopted many of the services that private industry had (or had not) provided. This type of system makes sense to have a supporting centralised organisation.

In the last twenty years out-sourcing has become more common. Many of the technologies that led to nation-state monopolies for capital reasons have commoditised to the point that non-state actors can afford them.

A good example of this is UAVs. Once the domain of nation-states, they have become affordable for private owners in the short space of twenty years. An Australian test recently had a garage built UAV fly from Canada to England, through storms and rain, to land a 5kg payload within five metres of its target in England. That type of precision had been a capital intensive pursuit in the past - not anymore.

In a commoditised environment the government needs to adopt flatter or decentralised structures otherwise they are adding inefficiencies into the system.

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