Dis-respect for due process and systems

Not long ago I was charged with leading a search for the company's new International Data Centre (IDC) - this was necessitated by the fact that a US company that our company had taken over was to be wound up and its physical operations moved out to Singapore while the data centre would be re-located to India. We called in a bunch of known companies to bid for co-locating our servers in their data centres and I was expected to go out and inspect each of these facilities.

Data Centres these days go by Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 type - the higher the Tier number the more complex amd more reliable the DC is supposed to be. There are internationally acknowledged levels of compliance that these various Tiers entail. My job was to check if these facilities were indeed Tier 2 when they claimed it was Tier 2. One of the top companies in this space took a colleague and me on a tour of their spanking new DC where they had a huge amount of heavily air-conditioned space with raised floors to accommodate the cabling that goes with computers and the security was severe. They took away our camera phones, and they had us smile into a camera to generate a mug shot that would adorn our visitor's pass and once inside, CC camera's monitored our every movement. A hi-tech Siemens Building Management Systems (BMS) controlled the temperature, humidity, access and power and reports are constantly generated about the variance from set values in any of those parameters! CCTV camera images are channelled to screens every where and to a central security console!

It didnt take me long to discover that people working in the facility had camera phones a plenty! And the BMS that was the nerve centre of the whole facility was un-secured in that there was no password required to access the system! This makes a mockery of the crores of Rupees the company has spent in putting all this Tier 2 infrastructure together! This apathetic attitude towards systems and processes seems ingrained in us as a people. Little will change in the lives of people in this country if we cannot respect systems and processes. Even disasters like the helicopter crash that killed a Chief Minister are caused by due process (maintenance) not being followed - yet we don't seem to learn our lessons. Wonder how and where we start instilling these values into our people - would it be at home, or school or at work? I'm beginning to think that its a leadership issue - if the people at the top insisted I am sure people down the line would fall in line - isn't that how the armed forces maintain discipline and a respect for systems? Where have all the leaders of civil and corporate society gone?