It’s inconceivable that a meal wouldn't be served at mealtime at Downton Abbey. If the food were bad for so much as a single meal, those responsible would be seeking other work. Computer services at a hospital? They fail to be served all too often – the users complain and race around making do. And are those services bad? Regularly. If Carson were the butler at a hospital, the IT staff would all be fired on the first instance of a meal of data not being served when and how it was supposed to be.
Meals at Downton Abbey
The kitchen staff works hard at Downton Abbey. They hold themselves to a high standard. The food is high quality, and it’s delivered on time. Every time.
It is literally inconceivable that the guests would be assembled, ready for their food, and none appears.
It’s not just the lordly Lord Grantham and the stern Mr. Carson who expect and get these results.
The kitchen staff, from Mrs. Patmore and everyone else, shows intense pride and ownership of their work.
Mrs. Patmore isn’t cowed into producing excellent results, on time every time. Mrs. Patmore accepts nothing less from herself.
Meals in Real Life
It isn’t just fancy television series for which is the case. We expect food for ourselves. We may give ourselves a little slack when it’s just ourselves, but when there are guests, for example at Thanksgiving? The kitchen and its staff may not be like Downton’s,
but it works and produces results. The results are appreciated by everyone at the dining table.
IT Services in Hospitals
In hospitals, it appears that system availability and up-time is like he-who-must-not-be-named in the Harry Potter books. It is simply not discussed among civilized people. The greater your status, the more demeaning it appears to be to have the subject even raised.
Partly because of the refusal to discuss this subject, there’s no good way of knowing how bad the problem really is. But lots of people, particularly those who work in hospitals, know the story – and they know that outages, slow-downs and crappy software are business-as-usual.
The Mount Sinai Hospital IT Horror Show
I’ve already told the story of the general horrors of the Mount Sinai computer system. I've also told the story of my personal encounter with the multi-day computer outage at Mount Sinai in New York. I have since made a diligent search for any public information about the outage I experienced, and computer outages at hospitals in general. Nada.
Lots of people in IT appear to think that cooking and serving the data, high quality and on time, is not their problem. That’s like Mrs. Patmore or Daisy shrugging their shoulders when the second day of meals not served comes and goes, and flatly declare something like “we’re doing our best, struggling with inadequate kitchen systems and suppliers who have failed us.” If that’s unthinkable for serving food to healthy people, why is it acceptable for delivering medical services to the sick and injured?
Conclusion
Where are the adults? Where is the outrage? Why don’t people do their jobs, and why does no one get fired when they don’t? I know Downton Abbey is just a TV show, but why is it completely unimaginable that Mrs. Patmore and her crew would fail to serve a single meal, while even with a budget of over $240 million, the CIO and his crew at Mount Sinai (and I suspect at other hospitals) fail to serve meal after meal of data and still have their jobs?
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