And, no, I’m certainly not interested in whether it would like to “come up and see me sometime” either, thank you very much.
Today, I’d like to tell you a tale of the impact of poorly communicated, and possibly, poorly understood governance relationships in our much-reviled public electricity network here in South Africa. A quick google search can’t tell me exactly whether the problem is with the city or with the national power grid, but what I do know is that I’m potentially not the only member of the population that will be unexpectedly sitting in the dark soon.
No. I’m not talking about the load shedding stuff I’ve mentioned before. This time, it appears that the single endpoint to the pre-paid purchasing system is…
…down.
And at this stage, it’s been down for at least 3 hours.
How ‘bout them apples?
As you might remember, here in South Africa – as well as in many other parts of the continent – you buy power in pre-paid installments by perhaps the most cumbersome system ever imaginable.
Smart meters? Um…no. Certainly, we’re dealing with very, very, VERY dumb meters here.
Every property built in the last many years has a pre-paid electricity meter, and on said meter, regardless of the manufacturer, is basically 3 things:
1 or 2 blinking lights,
an LCD screen,
and a keypad, some of which seem to require the force of an 18# sledge just to press the buttons.
So, if you would like your avos, beer and biltong chilled, you need to make sure that you keep feeding said meter on a regular basis, or, right in the middle of something important
Click.
And you’re sitting in the dark.
Now, you can get one of these darling little set of digits from a number of potential sources. You can go to a store, give them your meter number and your money, and they generate a code, or you can go to your online or mobile banking, type in your meter number (they already have your money), and you get your power code sent to you via SMS…
…or you can go to any number of online services where you can buy this electronically.
But regardless of the 3 ways you do this, there are actually 2 problems:
Problem #1 is that there’s no way to automate this except “the Africa way” which means to hire someone to do it for you, and
Problem #2 is that all of the available options seem – at least as was made clear to me today – to hit the same back-end service. Which, as I said…is down.
So, if you’ve somehow managed to not pay attention to your power meter (who would possibly do that?), and you need to buy power at this exact moment when I’m typing this email, then you’re basically SOL.
Now, you can rightfully say that I should’ve a) paid more attention to the power levels, or b) that I should have an extra voucher lying around for these sorts of situations…
…and those are all possible governance choices I could make as the accountable party in our house in charge of maintaining the performance of the Available attribute of our electricity supply.
And, normally, I do a pretty good job of a), but things have been hectic, and I wasn’t paying attention. However, b) was a previously unknown potential occurrence.
Sure. Eskom and load shedding are facts of life, however being unable to buy power across the whole supply system due to a single point of failure with wherever (could be the municipality of Cape Town, or it might be Eskom).
Actually, the fact that both of those are surprises and/or relevant is a governance problem—regardless who owns it.
The reality is, that these sorts of issues happen in organizations all the time. People don’t really understand the potential risk exposures in the internal “suppliers” or who makes those decisions because your modern organization is a pretty complex beast.
However, there’s a way to figure this out using SABSA’s governance model, and the 3 Baseline Perspectives of The Agile Security System™ give you a pre-built framework for making sure you’re hunting governance needles in the right haystack.
The upcoming December issue of the Security Sanity™ newsletter covers how to do this in some detail—as well as some of the fundamentals and subtitles of the SABSA Governance Model and inter domain relationships you might have forgotten.
To subscribe to it before the end-of-the-month deadline, go here:
That way you can avoid being in the dark – like I’m apparently about to be – thanks to a governance gaffe.
Stay safe,
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Archistry Chief Executive
