Which way did they go. . .
Having watched the over reaction to this mess I have been waiting for the real question to be asked. Where the hell was the Chief Information Officer who allowed this to happen? There should have been two, one at the State Department and one at the Clinton Foundation. In all the articles and investigations desperately looking for malfeasance and surrogates to blame that I have read, I have never seen reference to these people. I suspect that they didn’t exist or were not in clear command of the Information Technology process and resources. The bigger issue here is not individual failure but a much broader and deeper failure nationally to restructure organizations to operate successfully in a very dynamic, technologically demanding world. The result can be disastrously stupid mistakes. Despite vast resources being squandered in attempting to find some scandalous result we have a small scale, IT operational screw up being dug up and thrown out in the yard to be shot yet again.
My point, and others have made this, is that Hilary Clinton, or any other politician is not qualified to make decisions on email servers, email security, configuration of end user devices, IT staff qualification and responsibilities, or IT process management. I think she recognized that but followed the standard assumption that you just hire a geek or two to take care of this stuff and told them what she wanted. The result is presented to us weekly as the biggest pseudo scandal of this election distracting us from the huge, Cheetos colored, actual scandal that threatens the country.
Organizational managers and executives, public or private, are predominantly conservative and reluctant to allow new positions that directly compete for status and dollars. To an amazing extent to this day there is no top tier infrastructure technology executive in most mid-size organizations. This is ironic as nearly all of the global top ten corporations are now IT based replacing the old corporations that were led by finance and business managers. And we wonder why so many corporations lose millions of customer records and dollars not to mention emails. But, wait, they don’t even know about the emails. . .
The title is taken from an article, The News and its New Silent Majority: Clinton Supporters by Jeff Jarvis in Medium. This was initially written as as a response.
