What's the use of rigor for something that's irrelevant?

in: Notes on Metapattern and enneadic semiosis, part 2

 

[D]evelopments now labelled as electronic government usually frustrate rather than promote [… G]overnment is still failing to adapt to, and genuinely adopt, the general perspective of social dynamics. In actual practice, it prefers instead to continue to rely on its separate agencies (municipalities, provinces, national ministries, etcetera) to improve so-called services, only taking citizens as their respective clients.

in: Verkeersbegrip van algemeen belang: geschiedenis van infrastructurele stelselmatigheid voor toekomst van informatieverkeer

 

[G]overnments should position so-called electronic government as an early, if not initial, step in developing a genuine infrastructure for information traffic at large. Of course that is what citizens rightfully expect.

in: Civil information management, a short introduction: an information discipline for society and the metaphor of traffic

 

Governance of electronic government is entangled within itself. […] Projects and programmes, despite obvious rhetoric to the contrary, still largely produce separate resources. Lacking so-called interoperability, they fail to facilitate information flows even at the limited scope of citizen- and business-to-government interactions, let alone at the appropriate scope of society as a whole. Accordingly, such resources are essentially useless. Electronic government doesn’t deliver benefits.
A vicious cycle has become established. It starts with a misdirected project as it isn’t guided by a productive vision on the information, or network, society including its irreducible infrastructure for information flows or traffic. It remains unclear what the particular project should contribute to such an infrastructure.
When a project’s failure finally must be admitted, it is evaluated on more or less the single premise of shortcomings in governance. Next, evaluators with an overriding background in governance are recruited exclusively, rather than including at least some persons with in-depth interdisciplinary expertise. It simply follows that only changes in governance are recommended, in fact complying with the evaluation brief and thus solidifying myopia. Actual shortcomings are completely neglected, as evaluators, too, are incapable to recognize proper goals, means, dependencies etcetera. Additional governance measures cause the resumed or follow-up project to fail even stronger. Everything is set up for the cycle to repeat itself.
It takes the wider perspective of infrastructure to challenge the deadlock.

in: Infrastructuur op een briefje

 

[T]he web community is, again, looking for, say, a grammatical solution, i.e., general rules that cover specific cases. […] Didn't anybody learn to recognize the irreducibility of particular behavior to general rules? Of course, where general rules apply, we should use them. But rules are always a convenience, not a principle. It's really such mistaken abstraction that's the main obstacle for widening the horizon for information processing.

in: Notes on Metapattern and enneadic semiosis, part 1

 

[T]he more or less self-centred standards issued by government are not really standards at the wider scale of society as a whole. Therefore, they are not adopted. It only helps to start looking at the opportunities and problems more realistically, that is, at the proper scale of exchange variety.

in: Wat is een semantische standaard en hoe kan College Standaardisatie die vraag (anders) beantwoorden?

 

Understanding complementarity as a paradigm shift may help to understand why efforts controlling variety continue to fail in the field of information management. Classical presuppositions still rule, despite projects failing again and again at often huge costs. [For c]omplementarity in an extended sense […] Metapattern [is] available as a practical tool for modeling[.]

in: Metapattern for complementarity modeling

 

With so-called IT specialists mainly oriented at mechanics seen originating from first order logic — which is how they believe that a computer can only, and therefore must, be programmed — it cannot come as a surprise […] that information systems that should provide infrastructural facilities are mostly irrelevant, at best.

in: Invitation to contextualism

 

[A]s especially logical atomism is still dominant in information sciences, left largely implicit so as to make a necessary paradigm shift all the more difficult, so-called systems come out sub-optimal (to put it mildly).

in: note 53.16

 

To put it bluntly, there simply is no recovering from a counterproductive turn taken right at the start. There are practical problems to be solved, and the relevant scale is for some time already that of an integrated order.

in: note 71.13

 

It should therefore also be no surprise that larger-scaled projects, i.e., where conceptual variety for users is the sorely unrecognized critical factor, fail to deliver even moderately adequate tools.

in: note 71.36