The plugins attempt to answer two of the eternal questions, "Is there a god?" and "Who's on first?" No, wait a minute, those aren't the two. The two questions are, "Why do we keep electing people named George Bush as president?" and "Where the hell did that goddamn Godot get to, anyway? Is he drinking again?" Ok, not those either, but it does deal with the two big questions in data processing projects, "Why are companies so dumb?" and "Why is everything late all the time?" If we can get those two out of the way, the rest should be easy.
There are some memory-related problems with companies that cause them to be dumb even when their employees are smart. A great book called "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks, contains a case study of a man who had no short-term memory. Every morning he woke up and it was 1945. He remembered events that happened during the day for a short time, but as soon as his attention left them for a moment they evaporated like a dream and it was back to 1945. Companies, governments, and organizations in general have the opposite problem, they seem to have a limited amount of short-term memory and no long term memory at all. (The Yo-Yo Effect and the Horizon effect) discusses that problem and the kinds of behavior it causes.
(The Yo-Yo Effect and the Horizon effect) also talks about companies long-term planning. Companies are not just bad at this, they're notoriously and sensationally bad at it. Several of the plugins touch on this issue: (Year 2000), (The Outhouse), and (Why Projects are Always Late and Over Budget).
Mystery stories talk about "cherchez la femme", "search for the woman", as a way of solving murders. If you're looking for the reasons things happen in business, "cherchez la buck" works better.
The budgetary process at most companies is another structural problem. The idea of setting out spending limits at the beginning of the year and then seriously trying to stay within them may work in some areas, but it doesn't work very well for data processing. Data processing projects are a "zoom in" kind of process where at every step of the way more details are revealed. More details tends to mean more problems and more problems means more money needed. Some kind of "pay-as-you-go" structure would prevent the constant going back for more money, but perhaps it would cause more problems than it solved.
The fact that managers and data processors don't understand each other very well is the source of a lot of the problems.
When I first started to think about footnotes and endnotes, I thought, "Aha, I know what these are -- they're subroutines." And they do have a lot in common with a subroutine in a computer program, i.e. you can access them from multiple places in a document, they keep you from having to say the same thing over and over in different contexts, and they allow the reader to easily skip over them and not look at them if he or she so chooses -- the same reasons you write subroutines in computer programs. On reflection though, I think thse plugins are more like the main program and the rest of the book are the subroutines.