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DEL.ICIO.USSurprise. Your governor’s a Unix geek who hates decisions based on emotion and politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hmmm. On one day, Dick Pettys with Insider Advantage posts an article with this headline: “All of a Sudden, Glenn Richardson seems to be the ‘idea man’ in Georgia.”
On the next, Gov. Sonny Perdue rolls out a program to help small businesses provide employees with health insurance. It’s the first peep we’ve heard out of him in a while. The timing is extraordinary.
Even more extraordinary is the cutting loose of a long-held secret by the governor: He’s a Unix nerd who — back in the day — often edited his own code. It says so in a forth-coming article on the governor in CIO, a trade magazine for information tekkies.
See it here, but we offer this excerpt from a Q&A below:
CIO: What made you think that running state government like a business was a good idea? And what does IT have to do with that?
Perdue: The primary business principle I wanted to bring [to state government] was fact-based decision-making. Heretofore, I think our state had been run on a lot of emotional, political, “who’s-in-power” decisions rather than on data.
I don’t consider myself particularly gifted from an intuitive standpoint. Therefore, I have to rely on data and facts to make decisions.
I look at data as a compass, not as a map. We know that we want a more educated, healthy, growing and safe state, but what are the data points that we need to achieve those things?
The metrics in our state were in very poor shape. The very fact that a state — now, it’s a $20 billion business — did not even know how many automobiles it had, who was driving them, what were they being used for; that we had no consolidated database of the property we owned-from the perspective of a CEO or manager, if you don’t know where your fixed assets are and what their return on investment is, you have no basis on which to make decisions for the future.
I think the voters of Georgia felt disenfranchised. They believed that decisions were being made capriciously and arbitrarily based on politics rather than on sound principles. I think that was a distinction that I offered: a commitment to make decisions that would be customer-friendly, results-driven, data-driven, and serve people.
Comments
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By RJ
August 7, 2007 6:07 PM | Link to this
All this revelation does is offer another reason for his placement in the category of Georgia’s worst Governors. What a shame…eight wasted years.
By Mike K.
August 7, 2007 9:11 PM | Link to this
Therefore, I have to rely on data and facts to make decisions.
Except when they go against your “morality”
coughSundayAlcoholSalescough
By Jason
August 7, 2007 10:05 PM | Link to this
Used Unix way back when is not the same as being a Unix geek. Lots of people in their thirties wrote basic programs on an Apple II but that doesn’t mean that they’re programming geeks to this day.
As far as Sonny’s insurance program goes, socialism is socialism, regardless of if it is directed at the poor, rich, or middle class.
By Anonymous
August 8, 2007 8:15 AM | Link to this
Bush campaigned on the idea of “running government like a business,” and we can see what a disaster that’s been.
Government and business are inherently different. The last thing I want is a governor obsessing over how to maximize shareholder return (i.e., his contributors) and acting like an autocrat who has no need to listen to the rank and file. His job is public [i]servant[/i], not Evil Overlord CEO.
By CobbGOPer
August 8, 2007 9:39 AM | Link to this
Facts?
You mean like the apparently totally false “facts” about slow tax revenue that he used to screw the Speaker (and by extension, Georgia taxpayers) out of the $140 million tax cuts/refunds from this year’s session? Which we’ve now found out the state could have totally afforded?
Yeah, Sonny doesn’t make decisions based on his emotions… I can’t wait until we can relegate this jerk to the trash heap of Georgia history.
Isakson in ‘10!