Driving the Train

It is a source of some annoyance, from time to time, that in this age of automation and data processing there is this manifest tendency by those closest to the automation to lose sight of the bigger picture.  

What am I talking about?  What bigger picture?

By way of example, the big picture is that the logistical and administrative tail of an organization exists primarily not to support itself (although that is certainly a necessary component of its priorities) but rather its deployed or "frontline" activities.  For an army or navy, that means its ships and troops in harm's way.  For the State Department, that means that all the various bureaus, both geographic and functional, are there to support the operations of our embassies and consulates abroad (also sometimes in harm's way) rather than the other way around.

But that's just the big picture.  From a more elevated perspective, the bigger picture is indeed that the tail-end and the front-line activities exist to support the principals.  For State Department, that means our new SecState and President.  But not personally supporting them, really, rather instead supporting them in their Constitutional and legislatively-mandated roles.

But that's not really what I'm exercised about today.

There is this tendency, this drift, this proclivity that whenever a system is established, whether it be software or something more physical and/or procedural, that the care and feeding of that system becomes an aim and end to itself.  That propensity extends to the system beginning to compete for resources with the very activity or mission it is intended to support, to impeding or even restricting the success of the supported mission.

Consular officers get stuff done.  We've got a lot of tools in our kit to do this.  Some are legislative in nature, the authority (within certain defined limits) to adjudicate citizenship, visa, and passport decisions for instance.  Others are in the nature of hardware or software; everything from the computers and printers we use to issue travel documents and the software that makes them work properly, to a system of name-checking, photo-recognition, and other security software that is so amazingly fast compared to what it was in the pre- and immediately-post 9/11 era.  We have accountability software to keep track of our inventory and the money we collect in consular fees.  We even have, in addition to self-inking stamps and notarial seals for which we are notorious, a certain amount of honest-to-God red tape and sealing wax for a few certain obscure tasks that ever-so-occasionally demand it.

But there's this thing, this drift, this bent, this proneness whenever a support system is devised, that conflicts with the flexibility consular work demands.  When someone tells me I can't do something in the way of providing perfectly legal services in support of U.S. citizens because the tracking or accountability or other support-management system doesn't have a way to track it or account for it or to support it, that's when I start to get annoyed.  The system exists to support the lawful activity, or it should, not the other way around.  When the system impedes the lawful activity, the answer isn't "you can't do that, the system doesn't let you."  But oftentimes that's exactly the answer.