Page 80 - The Irony Board

Into the World

Systems analysis

We tie up loose ends,
Solving the riddle—
Until they fall out
Of the loose middle.

The workaday world constantly confronts its occupants with
philosophical problems. “Murphy’s Law” (formerly known as
“resistentialism”) is a prime example. As our man-machine
procedures of industry, commerce, and government become more
complex, so does our awareness of the ironies of diminishing
returns and dehumanizing “progress.” People participate in projects
they strongly suspect cannot succeed; cynicism breeds a sort of
fatalism, a belief in the inevitability of failure in a structure of
excessive scale.
Thus the Sisyphean fate of the systems analyst, a person whose
best efforts will have to be redone endlessly. Loose ends are the
ambiguous boundary-straddling elements of a system. Like Russell
and Whitehead attempting to reduce mathematics to logic,
somewhere an axiom has to be chosen which cannot support the
rest of the edifice; Godel’s dictum of “complete or consistent, but
not both” brings down the house. Similarly, the global solutions
attempted by planners in the mundane sphere are doomed by their
aspiration to completeness with consistency.
Gluckman’s experience working with computer-based accounting
systems confirmed this similarity to philosophical analysis: difficult
details can be forced into preconceived categories in order to finish
a job, and that job might then appear well-done; it will not be long,
however, before those untamed elements burst out of their cleverly-
constructed but fundamentally flawed container. Then the task
begins anew; the systems analyst can only console himself with yet
another maxim: “Never enough time to do it right, but always
enough time to do it over.”

78