The devil's in the detail

20.04.2007 Mike Brooks, www.accountancymagazine.com

Readers may recall the furore caused some while ago when it was revealed the director-general of the prison service admitted that he did not know, at any point in time, how many prisoners were on the run from open jails in England. This revelation led, of course, to the usual series of somewhat opportunistic responses, including the alleged claim that the lack of a central tally demonstrated the "shambles" in the prison service while other commentators reportedly argued that it was a symptom of prison overcrowding.

In the event, the director-general was forced to admit that he was embarrassed not to be able to provide these figures and that he would put in place a system for collecting and reporting these data in future.

Initially, I was as appalled as any other right-thinking citizen at what seemed to be yet another example of administrative incompetence by government. However, as regular readers of this column will know by now, I have a natural sympathy for the underdog and, in all the huffing and puffing, I detected, in the director-general's response, something that resonated with my own experience. For he pointed out - and this was not as widely reported as it deserved to be - that he did not actually need this aggregate information. Nor, he implied, did anyone else, since the police knew in detail who was unlawfully at large and it was their job to apprehend them and return them to custody.

Fools and wise men

This reminded me of the observation of Charles Caleb Colton, the 19th century English clergyman and writer, who noted that "the greatest fool can ask more than the wisest man can ever answer".

I recalled, in particular, one incident that occurred soon after I had taken over responsibility for budgeting and management reporting in a major operation in one of the world's finest companies. I was reviewing the information that had been prepared by my team for a major set-piece meeting, when I queried the purpose of a whole series of statistics that seemed to me to be of limited relevance.

After a certain amount of eye-rolling and concealed sniggering at the naivety of the new boss, I was told that "they" always asked for this information, just to check that we were on the ball. Even so, the extent of what had been prepared seemed to be excessive and further enquiry revealed that, in order to maintain my new department's reputation for omniscience, it was also necessary to guess what new irrelevancies "they" might demand, and to prepare accordingly.

I do not suppose that this was a unique experience, nor do I expect that others in my position acted differently in responding to it. Recognising that an unexpected refusal to provide this information would probably be a career-threatening move, I took the longer view and decided to deal with it gradually over time. Eventually, I persuaded my boss to introduce a systematic review of the need for all the information contained in our regular reporting - at that time, the whole quarterly pack took a month to prepare and, I suspect, as long to read. We did eventually manage to cut down the volume provided and, more importantly, my boss became brave enough to tell senior executives that he would not collect and disseminate information unless he was convinced of its business use.

In fact, he became so courageous that he introduced a policy that he would only agree to add an item to the management reporting pack if the board agreed to drop something else. Now, if you can get away with that...

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