Why 'Qmc - New societal chalenge'?

“There is an economic split between the North and the South. This division is a real seismic crack in the layers of the sociological crust of the planet. It will cause terrible thunder and earthquakes. If wealthy nations do not work on closing those cracks between the overly developed northern half of the planet and the starved southern hemisphere, no one will be completely safe, no matter the size of weapon stockpiles. There are no material obstacles to a reasonable, moderate and progressive solution to the development problem. Obstacles are just in the heads of people.”

Robert McNamara, former president of the World Bank and former United States Secretary of Defense, spoke those words in 1972. still under the impression of Vietnam war which left a big mark on him and quoted by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in his book The World Challenge (Le Defi Mondial) from 1980.

The Stormy 80s

The Independence and Non-Aligned Movements in African and Asian countries from the 50s and 60s did not produce the desired changes. While the standard of living in Industrial World doubled, in the Third World countries it increased by 3 USD per capita a year.

At the beginning of the 80s, the member countries of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) led by Sheikh Yamani, in so called Taif Accord set as their main development goal the transfer of technology to all the underdeveloped countries in exchange for oil supply.

At the same time, the eyes of the world are focused on the economic miracle - Japan, which gives hope for a better tomorrow. They surpass Germany and The United States in automotive industry by automation and robotics in manufacturing, and Toyota’s just-in-time production system with full quality control becomes the most efficient in the world. They take on a leading role in electronics and sell more watches than Switzerland.

Toshiwo Doko, at the time the chairman of Japan Business Federation and the leader of Japanese economic power said: "For all of us, the goal is simple - to create, spread and organize the technological power that will lift the world. '

His unique authority was based on seeing the world as a whole, and this notion did not remain abstract, but was confirmed by actions. They knew that the fundamental energy – oil stopped being inexpensive and inexhaustible, and that everything they have built must be rebuilt with other raw materials which are:

Thought, Information and Communication.

Jean-Jacques has rightly wondered in his book whether the mankind will be wise enough to find a new way out of the Plato's Allegory of the Cave which Plato mentions in his work The Republic some 2 500 years ago.

The answer came shortly after. The two revolutions, one theocratic in Iran and the other technocratic in America, directed the future of the world in different directions and even deeper divides.

They expanded the seismic sociological crackdown with even greater economic, cultural and religious divisions.

The Worrying 2010s

Today, forty years later, two-thirds of humankind are suffering from malnutrition, twelve million children die from starvation and illness every year while at the same time in developed countries, farmers and shopping centers keep throwing away their unsold surpluses. Wars are raging amongst various religious, national and political groups in countries where totalitarian regimes were taken down, and terrorist attacks threaten the citizens of the world.

"The rate of return on equity exceeds the growth rate of production and revenue in the real sector of the economy, which brings enormous gains to the investment funds, owners and financial intermediaries, while employees in the real sector of the economy get lower wages for more work," points out Nobel Laureate Thomas Piketty in 2013. in his book 'Capital in the 21st Century' (Le capitale au XXI-em siècle) and adds:

"As soon as the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth in production and income, as was the case in the 19th century and is threatening to become a norm in the 21st century, capitalism immediately leads to unsustainable, unjustified inequalities that undermine the meritocratic values ​​on which our democratic societies are based.”

Why the strategy of global technology development initiated in Japan has not been realized, why the visions from the book ‘The World Challenge' have not come true, and why even forty years after the revolution of information technology there is no global problem-solving mechanism?

The information revolution of the 80s was not started by hierarchical-bureaucratic power systems from the East Coast, but rather by counter-culturist children of the 1960s – drop out students and hippies in sandals.

They designed user friendly graphic interfaces and program coding tools by using first personal computers’ microprocessors and learning from video games in the garages and cellars of their parents' homes, which has inspired young people around the world to engage in computer programming.

By launching the Internet and World Wide Web services in the 1990s, there has been an explosion of IT web applications. Without this ingeniously simple innovation from Tim Bernese-Lee, whom not too many know about , there would be no Google, Amazon, Facebook or millions of other websites we visit every day.

A quarter of a century after his invention, it is clear that the Internet economy became the greatest source of wealth. "The structure of such economy is inverted  from the open architecture of technology which was created by the Internet pioneers. Instead, it is about a vertical system in which wealth concentrates rather than expands" says Andrew Keen in his book 'The Internet Is Not the Answer' from 2015. and continues:

'In today's digital experiment, the world is transformed into a society in which the winner takes everything. They say there is no hierarchy in the Silicon Valley, but only until it comes down to salaries and stocks. Instead of 'public service', the architects of the future from Silicon Valley are building a private networked economy that brings the greatest benefit to their wealthy and powerful owners. In June 2014. Google, a giant worth 400 billion USD was the second largest company in the world, right after Apple.

All strategies came down to one - to develop and publish the best software solutions in those areas that bring dominance in services and capital markets. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on commercials," noted one of Facebook's engineers with disappointment in his voice.

Industries of money, entertainment and consumption quickly directed the new technology towards creation of computer codes for multiplication of profits. There has been a crazed race in the development of functional solutions for the fastest transactions of service and capital. Programmers of large financial institutions are constantly improving the algorithmic procedures for high frequency trading of securities where microseconds decide whose transaction in that gambling economy will seize the profit prey first.
 
Hundreds of billions of dollars of initial accumulation, acquired in just over ten years, are being re-invested by leading Internet companies in projects like the development of autonomous vehicles, the construction of missiles for interplanetary flights or the construction of tunnels where cars will drive at a speed of 500 km per hour. They are competing who will develop faster, higher and stronger already developed parts of the world, while 12 million children in poor countries still die every year.   

In the midst of this digital and virtual whirlpool, one vital segment remained unchanged - the empire of a powerful political and bureaucratic establishment remains untouchable. Even forty years after switching from a typewriter to personal computers, the new technology has not changed the working model of administration in a closed, non-transparent structure of public institutions and administration. Its centuries-old self-sustained mechanism which extracts energy from tax levies, has managed to survive to this day.

Microsoft people who launched Windows operating system in 1985., could not have probably even imagined that their approach to modeling of the Office package would preserve the existing bureaucratic structure and a quiet transition from the industrial to the information era.

Although Gates in his book Business @ The Speed ​​Of Thought from 1999. emphasized the importance of process efficiency and compared it to breathing, apparently the authors of the Office did not recognize the dangerous bureaucratic trap when they created a yellow virtual folder – a digital version of a traditional cardboard folder for documents storing.
 
Folders are undoubtedly useful for grouping documents and data by specific concepts and topics, but are insurmountable obstacles to efficient Process and Project Quality management control ( P&P Qmc ) whose parts are in such way like split mosaic blocks, scattered in thousands of folders across innumerable departments and services of increasingly bulky state and local governments.
 
The public administration accepted the digital tools of Office with the open arms. They can now more rapidly duplicate and store document files in folders and unlimited computer memory in even greater quantities. What's more, they no longer have to worry about finding additional physical storage space in overcrowded archives.

By digitizing this existing ineffective bureaucratic structure, its metastases have been introduced into the electronic bloodstream of business and public administration and through the use of Windows and Office overtook the whole world in a short period, from poor and rich countries to gigantic institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations.

At the same time, managers together with software engineers are persistently trying to digitize and automate existing ineffective processes, instead of re-examining their causes. This was recognized in 1990. by the professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Michael Hammer in his Harvard Business Review article  “Don’t Automate, Obliterate” where he concluded: “Most of such work does not provide any added value to users and needs to be removed rather than automated”.

Bill Gates also pointed out in his book that if certain parts of the process are automated independently of the rest, or other parts of the process, such a system will not be at a high level of efficiency. One of the fundamental technological principles is that the introduction of automation in well-organized business increases efficiency and vice versa, if it is introduced into a poorly organized system, efficiency decreases.

Absurd is the fact that the introduction of IT document or process management applications into an ineffective bureaucratic structure such as e-administration, benefits only  IT companies through their costly implementation and monthly or annual fees for support and maintenance.

The consequences are such that not even all of Microsoft founders’ selfless donations to help the children, the hungry, and the sick in Third World countries cannot unfortunately change the existing condition, not until a Copernican turn is taken to remove the causes.

To achieve this, it is necessary

(1) to apply a technological model that will degrade the bureaucratic hierarchical system or at least dig channels through its vertical walls and free the flow of administrative processes.

(2) Link their parts by logical, analog editing of activity sequences, and describe procedures with its critical and control points.

(3) Impose the priority of process and project management over hierarchical management.

It is also a precondition for successful approach to development of digital algorithms for parts of the operations, in order to speed them up, standardize and automate.

A Fall Into Entropy or the Way to the Renaissance
Steve Jobs emphasized that his goal was always not to accumulate money, but rather to create exceptional. In his famous 1982. Speech at Stanford he complained: 'I went to study right after the 1960s, before the wave of practical purpose. Today, students do not even think in idealistic categories. My generation was different, but the idealistic wind of the 1960s still blows in our backs and most of the peers I know carry it with them forever.'

Unfortunately, that wind did not help neither Bill or Steve to transform their historical achievements into building a better world for all. To the first one because of the bureaucratic trap he fell in but hasn’t seemed to realize it to this day, and to the other one because of the virtual entertainment industry that increasingly draws young generations towards pointless leisure instead of creative development and adding new values.

However, the information revolution that has flared in the direction which leads downwards  doesn’t mean that the great power of information and communication technology cannot bring the necessary changes.

Virtual energy of thoughts, concentrated through smartphones and social networks can create  a social chain reaction in a matter of minutes. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia in 2010. and 2011. and protests such as 'Occupy Wall Street' in 2011., under the slogan: We are the 99%, or the one in Sarajevo in 2014. confirm this.

Nevertheless, history constantly points out that the uprisings without clear goals nor program or model for their implementation inevitably lead to new divisions, conflicts and an even greater danger of chaos. The immersion of great powers through the pursuit of their partial interests, adds the oil to the fire and the consequences are obvious.

“Revolution can overthrow a dictator or incompetent and corrupt government, but it will only be successful thereafter if it has a good plan and a strategy how to implement it. Creating a page on Facebook or Twitter is not a plan. Real operational skills are what will bring revolution to a successful end." wrote Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, president and director of Google in their book ‘The New Digital Age’ from 2013. (The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business).

They warned: 'A series of failed revolutionary movements will make the future generations to demand from opposition groups not only their vision but also their detailed plan for building a new state. In the absence of evidence for previous activities, they will firstly need to convince the public of their credibility. Today's opposition leaders can give vague statements and try to convince citizens that they know what they are doing, but the informed public of the future will request details. It would be wise they be truly prepared. The plans will literally be perceived as the basis of the new system. Groups that are unwilling to present them or cannot implement them in a satisfactory manner, lose credibility.'

However, the Googlers unfortunately did not announce the development of operational skills that they mentioned in their book, in order to make the contribution themselves.

"A major reform of public administration is at a standstill in the Republic of Croatia," points out European Commission's report from March 2018.

None of the previous Croatian governments has made any significant progress. The changes are persistently and unsuccessfully attempted to be carried out by the constant adopting and changing of legal acts. This model of work, characteristic for autocratic systems with strictly distributed competencies across administrative units, doesn’t take into account procedural functionality and avoids responsibility for inefficiency by transferring jurisdiction (Catch 22).

By switching digital business from individual computers to networked cloud computing, arose the ability to link processes and projects to functional entities, regardless of disconnected locations and formal organizational affiliation of their participants. This provided an opportunity for a change by introducing a process-project model of quality management control that is superior to the existing hierarchical bureaucratic model.

This opportunity has been utilized in the development of the P&P Qmc ICT model which can immediately start to act on the most critical public administration processes such as: solving property legal affairs or judicial and administrative proceedings, which are crucial for the implementation of the reforms and for a step forward from the stalemate position in development.

By using standard Office files, the Qmc model implementation is very simple and does not require any prior software nor training so that work teams and managers can focus on logical process organization and project management.

Although offering an innovative approach to structural reforms, all the reach outs to government as well as public and local administrations remain unanswered so far.

In anticipation of such an outcome, since closeness and non-transparency are the characteristics of bureaucracy, “Qmc - New Societal Challenge” web platform was created to make this initiative accessible on internet and open to public opinion.

It functionally adds on to Qmc model, so that reforms and other projects in public administration, businesses and institutions can be followed through Project Tasks, Activities, Action-Reaction, Comments, Qmc Initiatives and Documents. This allows a transparent and systematic insight into the implementation of restructuring plan and program for each program measure individually.

Qmc project is in its initial, start-up phase. It will be upgraded and adapted on the go as needed and implemented in the first pilot projects. Its effects will depend on the synergy with those responsible for the implementation of structural reforms, speed of implementation and public support.

Instead of a Conclusion - Action!
Today's generation, unlike any other so far, has the ability to devise a program and plan for creating a new social order via free internet access - something which previous generations could only dream of.

By shaping a process-oriented mechanism to address global development issues, they will convince the general public in their credibility, avoid the traps Googlers wrote about and set technological foundation of the new system.

By transferring the models and skills that dig into the vital points of social development management, the crack between the developed and the underdeveloped will start to close, and the gap between the rich and the poor will gradually narrow.

If knowledge and skills are power, communication is their mean of dissemination.

The Internet opens wide the door to democratization of thinking, proposing and deciding how to do something best in the interests of everyone. Through network effect and feedback, it provides a historic opportunity to transfer excellence to all human beings on the planet.

The ultimate goal is to establish a functional political system in which voters will elect programs and the responsible team of people to implement them according to the new P&P model, in which besides the offered goals and tasks, implementation deadlines will be clearly indicated and will enable transparent monitoring and evaluation of results via ICT media.

Just remember the wise words of Robert McNamara: "There are no material obstacles to a reasonable, moderate and progressive solution to the development problem. Obstacles are just in the heads of people."- and take action.

Revolutionary information development technology has started from Palo Alto, California in the 80s - why not try to launch a new political and administrative project-process development technology from Split, Croatia?

Countdown to “Qmc - New Societal Challenge” platform launch is about to start, join us!

P&P Qmc team