BOGE

I thought Elon Musk was IT.  Isn't part of the rationale of electing business people rather than technocrats that we want government run like a business?*  No decent business that I know would stomach Musk's willy-nilly implementation of change without a Change Control process.

In IT  (and perhaps in your line of work) we have a little thing called Change Control—an annoying little process you have to go through before you make any change to production systems in order to ensure that the change will not break what it’s supposed to fix or break anything you didn’t take the time to consider would be  impacted.  You’re supposed to have a plan, one which involves understanding the requirements of the change; developing it in an environment isolated from the one people use for their jobs; testing it, debugging it and testing again; developing a test plan for users involving actual use cases from their jobs, socializing the change with others whose impacts you may not have considered and getting buy-in from all before you’re allowed to proceed, communicating the change beforehand to all including a thorough explanation of why the change is being made, what is expected to be impacted, what users are expected to do before, during and after the implentation.  And if the change goes badly you’re supposed to have a plan for rolling it back. And if you're rolling it back as much as you're rolling it out, your process is ass.  Even in the best processes, things are overlooked, someone did not fully understand the impact a change would have and because change sucks, users will still be unhappy with it.  That is supposed to be addressed.  The idea being Do No Harm.  

As much as we hate the change control process, there is something to be said for making the social outcasts who do IT think about other people and what they need and want to get out of a system before they get their gloms on it.  But where are any of the precepts of Change Control in DOGE’s process?  It is the sloppiest fucking change I’ve ever seen.  Unprofessional. Noob. Bogus.  Shameful. Fireable.  And no one whose systems are being mauled by Musk's minions asked for it, least of all the voters who put Musk's figurehead in the White House. Again.  (Probably because they were afraid or unhappy or incurious about the actual unknown change of the alternative.)  

No one likes change.  But there are two kinds of it.  One, the kind that Elon Musk (and as recently seen in the Tariffs fiasco, the entire Trump administration) is not practicing is the end result of a well thought out, intentional, purposeful, carefully executed process that is in place to serve the needs of the users of a system and if thought out and done well, improve it.

The other we call disaster. 

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* Those who have bought the truism that the solution to government is to run it like a business forget that ideal government serves the people; ideal business serves only those who own it.  It should be fucking obvious now.