The French government has announced it will rate bureaucratic red tape using a ‘Kafka index’:
France has created a “Kafka index” that measures the complexity of a project or law against its usefulness to cut red tape. The index - referring to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which describes one man’s fight against a nightmarish bureaucracy - is a scale of one to 100 measuring how many hurdles, from forms to letters or phone calls, are needed to win state permits or aid for a project.
“It is an indicator to measure as objectively as possible the most complex procedures so that we can then simplify them,” said a government spokesman. [Link]
I’d have suggested a Brazil index had I not witnessed the following exchange at a Reliance Mobile branch in Bombay last week:
Customer: I closed my account a month ago, but you billed me another thousand bucks.Rep: Saar, you have to clear an additional 80 rupee charge.
Customer: Where do I go to get the account permanently closed?
Rep: Saar, you must go to the Lilavati branch.
Customer: I’ve been going there for four days now. Every day they say their systems are down.
Rep: Saar, that is the only branch which can close accounts.
Customer: I just came from there!
Rep:
You must go there only.Customer:
I just came from there!Rep: You must go there only.
Customer: I just came from there!
Rep: You must go there only.
Me: [Trying to stifle a giggle]Customer: [Goes off on rep]
Rep: [Sits stone-faced]
And that was a private company. To be sure, these surreal scenes are not unique to India. No more than one in three accounts I set up in the U.S. are done correctly the first time. Companies still organize customer service processes around their internal departments rather than around simple customer tasks.
