Nation’s Most Important Infrastructure Revealed To Be The Guy Who Knows How To Reset The Router
LONDON (PRAT.UK DATELINE) — A Cabinet Office review of critical national infrastructure resilience has produced an unexpected finding: that in the majority of public sector organisations, NHS trusts, local councils, and medium-sized companies surveyed, the single most operationally critical individual is not the chief information officer, the network architect, or the head of digital transformation, but a specific person — often known simply as “Dave” or “the IT bloke” — who knows which router is which, where the reset button is, and critically, how long you have to hold it down for it to actually work.
The Dave Problem: Systemic, Unacknowledged, Urgent
The review identifies what it terms “critical tacit dependency” — the concentration of essential operational knowledge in individuals who have never been asked to document it, are not reflected in any organisational chart above a certain level, and whose institutional knowledge would, upon their departure, render portions of the organisation’s digital infrastructure “technically operational but practically inoperable,” which is civil service language for: nobody else knows what Dave knows and we haven’t thought about this until now.
The National Cyber Security Centre has consistently highlighted human factors as a primary vulnerability in organisational security posture — a finding usually interpreted to mean phishing susceptibility, but which applies with equal force to the scenario in which Dave retires and takes with him the knowledge that the server room switch needs to be turned off in a specific sequence or it locks the building’s fire doors.
Composite Portrait Of A Dave
Based on the review’s case studies, the critical infrastructure individual typically: has been with the organisation for between eleven and twenty-three years; has a job title that does not reflect their actual function; is the first person called when anything stops working and the last person consulted when anything is being changed; has warned, on at least three occasions, that the current setup is “fine for now but will cause problems”; has been overruled each time in favour of a procurement decision made by people who have since left; and is, the review notes, “currently fine, probably, we think, though we should really check.”
The Recommendation
The Cabinet Office recommends that all organisations identify their Dave, conduct a knowledge transfer programme, document his institutional memory, and — the review is admirably direct here — “consider whether his salary reflects the degree to which everything depends on him,” which it almost certainly does not.
— Prat.uk, Currently Waiting For Dave To Look At Something On The Third Floor
