"Well, I never heard it before, but it sounds like uncommon nonsense." -- The Mock Turtle, "Alice in Wonderland"

Every now and then you read, hear or see a very small act and it speaks volumes of information. It could be someone's posture in a meeting or one brief line in an e-mail. The act itself is of little consequence but what the action often says is profound.

		Mark DeSantis is a management consultant and adjunct professor at the Heinz School of Carnegie Mellon University. He lives Downtown (markd2@andrew .cmu.edu).

The small act in this case is the city government's new policy limiting Internet access by city employees to 30 minutes a day (in 10-minute chunks). The window on reality is the tragic quality of governance in our city.

In the Post-Gazette article last week about the restriction, Howard Stern, the city's chief information officer, said, "This is part of professionalizing city government." That is the deeper and disturbing message embedded within.

The first impression we have is how naive this small act is as a first action (the first I am aware of) by the elected to professionalize the appointed in the city. Yet its substance is not education, performance-based management or accreditation of employees, but forbidding them from doing a thing -- accessing the Internet -- that is essential to any individual or organization working in Western civilization today.

The next impression is how infantile and degrading it is. Put yourself in the shoes of a city employee. You are told you cannot access the Internet for more than 30 minutes because you apparently lack the self-discipline to tear yourself away to do your job. What an inspired act of leadership.

The third impression leaves one puzzled: How can 21st-century organization function without the Internet? How in the world is our city government organized where this is even remotely possible?

The fourth impression is a city governance system with no understanding or no interest in understanding the true costs of doing something. How much management time and effort will it take to enforce this policy? What is the gain?

If your tool for improving efficiency and effectiveness, which is the main point of "professionalizing" anything, is to restrict employees from using a tool that is an essential part of every professional's life, then you truly have no idea what you are doing.

The overall impression of this small act is a governance system with no relationship to reality. There is no sense of a city governance system at all. Rather, a (new) small clique meandering into a looming crisis of which we (and they) are only vaguely aware. This small act just looks desperate and pathetic.

If you want to "professionalize," something you start with outputs (i.e., cleaner streets, more timely processing of applications and forms, maintenance of public roads and facilities) and work backward. We should be willing to let every city employee spend as much time as he or she wants fiddling around on the Internet so long as the following conditions are met:

The outputs and the costs of providing these outputs for each department will be assessed quarterly by a third party with the results published in the local papers.

This assessment will also be compared quarterly to the top 10 performing cities across the United States.

The benefits of improved efficiency and effectiveness will be shared directly by city employees and citizens alike. Benefits to employees could come in the form of more vacation, a cash bonus, advanced education and broad public recognition.

Managers who fail to provide minimum performance improvements in city services year to year will be retrained. If they then fail to improve, they'll be terminated.

In an unintended way, the city governance system has given us a window through which we can see inside if we care to look. The saddest part of this small act is not only what we see but also that we have to use such a small window to see our city government reality in the first place.