In my experience, this arises as an unintended consequence of the quest to lower costs and reduce bureaucracy.
About ten years ago, a new manager was brought in to make us act less like a moribund government department and behave more efficiently. As an example of government waste, he pointed to the money we were spending on storage for data back-ups. We wouldn't need back-ups if we stopped making mistakes.
You might think that this no-back-ups policy would be an instant disaster, but it lasted years without issue. When there was a failure, the manager would hand the sys-admin a soldering iron, the admin would fix the hard drive, and we would be back on track. Finally, the sys-admin retired and a new one replaced him. Not long after, a critical system failed and data that we were required by law to maintain was lost. The manager handed the admin a soldering iron and told him to fix the hard drive. The admin said it was impossible and the manager fired him (yes, you can get fired from a government job). Other candidates were interviewed, but no one applying for a $30k job was confident that they could repair a broken hard drive.
Finally, there was talking of hiring the old admin to come out of retirement and fix the drive. Except he explained that it had always been impossible. During his tenure, he'd spent 5% of his salary (gross, not net) paying for back-ups and replacement drives. When the manager gave him a soldering iron, he'd just chuck out the old drive, by a replacement off Newegg with his personal credit card, and load it with the data he'd backed up to his personal S3 storage. His back-up script was still running on the server, but he'd stopped paying for the storage space the moment he retired.
Eventually, the manager was forced to spend a whole year's budget on an expensive data-retrieval firm to collect the data (which was still cost an order of magnitude less than the fine the department would have had to pay if we'd lost the data). He was fired and a new manager brought on board. Because of the money which had been lost on the data retrieval, new measures were put in place to prevent this from ever happening again. This included a new back-up system and audits to ensure that other employees were using personal funds to pay for departmental resources. Of course, this meant rigorously documenting exactly what resources each employee was using...
Six years after the manager was brought in to decrease cost and increase agility, we were now more over budget and tightly controlled than we'd ever been.
About ten years ago, a new manager was brought in to make us act less like a moribund government department and behave more efficiently. As an example of government waste, he pointed to the money we were spending on storage for data back-ups. We wouldn't need back-ups if we stopped making mistakes.
You might think that this no-back-ups policy would be an instant disaster, but it lasted years without issue. When there was a failure, the manager would hand the sys-admin a soldering iron, the admin would fix the hard drive, and we would be back on track. Finally, the sys-admin retired and a new one replaced him. Not long after, a critical system failed and data that we were required by law to maintain was lost. The manager handed the admin a soldering iron and told him to fix the hard drive. The admin said it was impossible and the manager fired him (yes, you can get fired from a government job). Other candidates were interviewed, but no one applying for a $30k job was confident that they could repair a broken hard drive.
Finally, there was talking of hiring the old admin to come out of retirement and fix the drive. Except he explained that it had always been impossible. During his tenure, he'd spent 5% of his salary (gross, not net) paying for back-ups and replacement drives. When the manager gave him a soldering iron, he'd just chuck out the old drive, by a replacement off Newegg with his personal credit card, and load it with the data he'd backed up to his personal S3 storage. His back-up script was still running on the server, but he'd stopped paying for the storage space the moment he retired.
Eventually, the manager was forced to spend a whole year's budget on an expensive data-retrieval firm to collect the data (which was still cost an order of magnitude less than the fine the department would have had to pay if we'd lost the data). He was fired and a new manager brought on board. Because of the money which had been lost on the data retrieval, new measures were put in place to prevent this from ever happening again. This included a new back-up system and audits to ensure that other employees were using personal funds to pay for departmental resources. Of course, this meant rigorously documenting exactly what resources each employee was using...
Six years after the manager was brought in to decrease cost and increase agility, we were now more over budget and tightly controlled than we'd ever been.