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Service catalog: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Argos catalog.jpg|450px| | [[File:Argos catalog.jpg|450px|frameless|center|A [[service catalog]] yesterday. Argos recently got rid of them, interestingly.]] | ||
}}A [[service catalog]], per someone’s lovingly curated original research on Wikipedia: | }}It is strange what the service catalog — a work of utter science fiction dreamed up by a someone who has taken one too many Six-Sigma workshops — omits. It won’t mention “answering stupid questions,” “trying to forlornly to recover documents because [[Microsoft Office]] unexpectedly crashed”, “retyping them once you give up looking for them”, “attending ‘the future of legal’ transformational journey workshops”, “covering one’s own arse”; “trying to ''look'' like one is covering someone else’s arse, to make them go away, while not actually doing so”, “sitting on pointless [[committee|committees]] designed to cover ''everyone’s'' arse” or “attending pointless [[conference calls]] to save the time of one lazy arse who would rather waste twenty hours of other people’s time rather than one of his”. Yet these activities, and ones like them that also won’t be in the service catalog, occupy the lion’s share of a modern professional’s working life. | ||
A [[service catalog]], per someone’s lovingly curated original research on Wikipedia: | |||
:“''... acts as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed enterprises to see, find, invoke, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the world. This means that people in one part of the world can find and utilize the same services that people in other parts of the world use, eliminating the need to develop and support local services via a federated implementation model. Centralizing services also acts as a means of identifying service gaps and [[redundancies]] that can then be addressed by the enterprise to improve itself”<ref>In other words, by firing people.</ref> | :“''... acts as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed enterprises to see, find, invoke, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the world. This means that people in one part of the world can find and utilize the same services that people in other parts of the world use, eliminating the need to develop and support local services via a federated implementation model. Centralizing services also acts as a means of identifying service gaps and [[redundancies]] that can then be addressed by the enterprise to improve itself”<ref>In other words, by firing people.</ref> | ||
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[[Legal]] owns the legal risks you ''can’t'' catalog in advance. | [[Legal]] owns the legal risks you ''can’t'' catalog in advance. | ||
===Service catalogs and the high-modernist approach to management=== | ===Service catalogs and the [[high-modernist]] approach to management=== | ||
Service catalogs and risk taxonomies also suffer from the folly of [[reductionism]]. For what is a | Service catalogs and risk taxonomies also suffer from the folly of [[reductionism]]. For what is a service catalog if it is not an attempted atomisation; an attempt to reduce an ineffable whole to a series of articulated, effable, components, each of which can be understood on its own terms, in management theory, by management, without loss of fidelity? | ||
This will to trifurcate [[Legal services|legal services]] into the “bespoke” (a proper subject for a real lawyer) the “standard” (legalish, but not ''hard'': suitable for outsourcing to some para-legal operational business with common sense but not possessing the higher sense of taste and style of a learned fellow) and programmatic (outright [[Chatbot]] fodder) — blame {{author|Richard Susskind}} for this easy categorisation; it was his idea — notwithstanding that almost ''any'' legal service worthy of a name has components of all three in it, and teasing them apart is often more trouble than it is worth. | |||
And, we think, risks missing something that [[Emergence|emerges]] from their confluence. You lose the big picture when you descend into the weeds. At one level, you lose simple ease of processing: to save a “bespoke” lawyer twenty minutes of a twenty-five minute job, you might carve the something as dreary as a [[confidentiality agreement]] negotiation into its articulated parts: contract policy formulation; fallback creation; document assembly; web-service creation and maintenance; negotiation, dialogue, drafting, accord, execution, data capture and document storage and of course the secondary range of bureaucratic quality control measures: procurement, management information and statistics, internal audit and so on. You could do all these things, intellectually, but to what actual point? It’s a goddamn ''confi''. | |||
Say you do it “old school”: sure, the dispatch of an [[NDA]] takes an expensive lawyer twenty minutes longer, but comes along once a month, and often provides a convenient diversion during that stakeholder check-in call. and that one, over-qualified lawyer, while handling all that micro-bifurcation, might just see something in the intersection of two roles she, according to management theory, ought not be doing. It does happen: sometimes it is just easier to think while typing than hand it off to a minute secretary. | |||
And, | And is that lost twenty minutes sacrosanct anyway? Is it a machine-edged unit of productive value? Any of you, my dear readers, who have ever ''met'' an experienced lawyer, let alone happened to, you know, ''be'' one, will know it is not. Only a management consultant — or a legal futurologist — could imagine that one day the world’s corporations might sweat their senior lawyers like pieces of industrial machinery, that their productive output would remain unstintingly constant throughout the day. And only a management layer not notice far more reliable, and significant, source of unproductive downtime amongst its senior counsel: all the time they spend pissing around on [[operating committee]]s, filling out forms, approving stationery requests, trying to get the blessed skype to talk to your sound card, attending innovation workshops and transformation journey seminars, completing [[computer-based training]], and — above all — answering idiotic questions from management. | ||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||