I find this outlook deplorable and a significant contributing factor to why companies can't do better.

Read: https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/d...

and do better. You have choice. Use it.

I do not agree with the thrust of this article. Some of the issues raised only arise because of the the sloppy or incorrect identification of root cause by software people, which then falls into a definitional whack-a-mole-game. Not helpful at all.

Now, the author rightly argues that coming up with RCA isn't easy. In particular it tends to follow a twin inverted V shape:

   <--- starting wide various technical/operation issues considered 

\_/

+ <--- narrowing to the root"ist" technical cause

/-\

   <--- widening back into organization issues as to why an         agent of change could do or did do something 

In addition, unlike manufacturing, there is no sense of 6-sigma riding on top of a domain of work governed by natural science so that arriving at a quantitatively convincing argument of root cause is generally not possible.

Even the book on TQM in 6-sigma work:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/d...

points out that technical issues often dissolve into organizational issues. See page 57-58 then elsewhere.

So where does that leave one? Dealing with the many contributing factors in an organization that impinge on decisions which may lead to bugs/outages/defects:

- Eliminate opportunity defects. Simplify.

- Inputs to the next process should be controlled (in manufacturing parlance they are X-sigma quality). It's harder for me to screw something up if what I start with conforms to its requirements aligned ultimately with customer satisfaction.

- quality is everybody's problem. See again pg57-58. Sectionalism is a major impediment to enterprise wide improvement

- the ultimate aim is continuous improvement of which RCA (fish bone diagrams and the rest) are but tools. The salient business question is: ok, a client outage occurred. Not OK, but does it repeat?

Root cause analysis? Plants are doing just fine. Human organizations can be helped by root cause analysis. That's just how it is.