Sometime ago I worked for a financial company, one night at around 3 AM the operations department encountered a problem with one of the applications and called the software developer on duty to investigate. He logged into the system and proceeded to analyze and debug the application. Sometime after he identified the problem and then decided to fix it in production even though there was a company wide rule that strictly forbids developers from making changes to production code, in the production environment without the approval of upper management. The problem was relatively minor so he fixed it and went back to bed, I am sure feeling very proud of himself, basking in his brilliance probably thinking, what they would do without him?
By the time he came into work the next morning all hell was breaking loose and everyone was on the mother of all conference call, no one had time to be diplomatic about anything as they let the fucks fly. The main problem was even though the developer in question was successful at fixing the problem as it pertained to his application, he failed to perform a system wide analysis to see how his changes would affect the entire suite of interconnected systems. As a result of his change bad data was being disseminated everywhere and started affecting many of the trading platforms which forced the company to halted trading, while we all worked under extreme pressure to put in place a proper solution that would satisfied the needs of every subsystem that depended on the data. The company lost millions in both dollars and goodwill, he was fired on the conference call and a security guard was dispatched to immediately remove him from the premises… in tears.
The rule that developers were not allowed to change code in production without permission is a good rule because if you unleash your development staff on your production environment it would be anything goes and anarchy would result due to lack of proper due diligence and poor communication, we can be one dimensional at times when we are in our zone…
What goes for a Computer System also goes for every system and the system of government is no exception to that rule. If Government ministers are allowed to do what they want, when they want to and how they want to, then it would be complete anarchy and the system would quickly grind to a disastrous halt. Rules, Regulations and Procedures are in place for a reason and that is to protect us from our self, to safeguard against human nature and to ensure business continuity.
If Rules, Regulation and Procedures are not followed, then maybe some good things might happen as a result but knowing human nature, a whole heap of bad things will happen, as was seen when regulations was removed from the American financial sector, anarchy ensued and all hell broke loose as the greedy bankers made up their own rules as they go.
Minister Richard Azan for whatever reason, good or bad, broke the rules, disregarded government procedures and took it upon himself to start a project, then took it upon himself to hired a contractor and allowed that contractor to collect rent from the finish project and like the software developer he must pay the price and should not be reinstated into the Government and I do not care which Political party he belongs to, nor do I actually care what PNP or JLP partisan diehearts have to say about it.
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