chieftech’s blog

I'm a big fan of the Charles Handy's 1991 classic, the Age of Unreason and the concept of the Shamrock Organisation that he describes in it. However, I wasn't quite sure what to expect with The Elephant and the Flea. The style is very autobiographical, which some people might see as being quite self-indulgent by the author since the book isn't sold as a biography. However, really it is like sitting down and having a one-on-one interview with Handy where he explains his own story and how his professional and personal life experiences have come to shape his management ideas and theories, as well as his concerns for the future. But there is no hype or guru worshipping here. Handy isn't perfect, but his honesty about his own mistakes along the way and awareness of his own limitations is refreshing.

Despite being published in 2001 and the fact Handy is a little bit of a technology laggard (but not a luddite), I was surprised at how relevant the conversation still is to a world undergoing the influence of the Internet revolution. Handy doesn't predict the rise social media and social networking as we have now experienced it, but the underlying issues of the social and organisational changes taking place that are characterised by the concept of the Elephant and the Flea are part of that trend. However, Handy isn't going to do that thinking for you. Read his story and then make some time to go away and think about it. One of the key challenges I see now is that while social software makes us all 'Fleas', even if we work inside an 'Elephant', do we all want to be 'Fleas' and do we need the 'Elephant'?

There are many more ideas and issues to explore, if you give this book a chance. However, I also have to say that this probably shouldn't be the first Charles Handy book you should read. If you have enjoyed his other work and would like more insight into the mind of this great thinker and teacher, then it makes a pleasurable and satisfying read. It is almost as good as meeting him in person.

The technology annual report
We wrote an article about this a few months ago in the form of a memo from the CTO to the CEO, laying out the concept of an annual report for technology. Click here. Since we published this, we have received valuable responses from technology leaders. The concept seems to resonate. One head of IT strategy in a leading electric utility said he was keen to implement this concept in his own.  “This makes perfect sense," he said.  "Just like the annual report for the enterprise  communicates with investors and seeks to build enthusiasm in this community, we in IT need to build enthusiasm among all those involved in providing funding for IT. Establishing and sharing an IT balance sheet covering both tangible and intangible assets will raise awareness in our executive committee and provide a much better platform for the dialog around technology enablement.”

You mean you weren't doing this already? Scary.

No wonder senior IT execs and even intranet managers have trouble selling the value of new concepts like Enterprise 2.0 - they aren't even promoting internally the benefits of what they do now... (to busy benchmarking themselves perhaps?)

In this other post, Stewart Mader digs out the old McAfee-Davenport debate and concludes:

So Tom’s right — the absence of technology isn’t the only reason that organizations are hierarchical. The people in charge of those organizations organized them that way because it’s what they understood how to do. And Andrew’s right — today’s ubiquitous technologies that we use in all facets of our lives are different from the earlier tools that had a specific place and use.

I thought I would dig a little deeper and take a look at the history of the railways in the US for some insights into the history of these hierarchical structures we take for granted. These course materials from UC San Diego provide an overview of this history and they say:

The earliest railroads used the same simple form of business organization that almost all other businesses used at that time – the unified or entrepreneurial form of organization. This was the traditional owner-controlled facility in which the owner made the day-to-day operational decisions and set long term goals.

....

In the 1850s Daniel McCallum of the Erie Railroad perfected the operations department (responsible for moving trains and obtaining freight and traffic business) and devised the system of information flows using the telegraph. He was the first to clearly define the duties and responsibilities of the executive and administrative officers on a large railroad and to spell out the lines of authority and communication between the various officers of the road. Part of this scheme was a detailed system of information that flowed upward through the organization using the telegraph.

(Emphasis added)

I think technology has played a role in shaping organisational structure. However, the catalyst for change includes other managerial drivers, such as the need to manage scale (including a literal train wreck) and volumes of transactions, combined with the availability of an appropriate technology.

Considering Gartner is quoted as saying that "as much as 60% of an organization’s processes are unstructured – and probably also unmonitored, unmanaged, unknown and unruly" (hat tip to Sig) it sounds like we still haven't quite solved that management challenge as perfectly as the org charts might suggest. Enter new social computing technologies that offer the chance to help bridge that last effectiveness gap.

The question is, are you going to wait for your own organisational train wreck before you do something about it?

McAfee's definition of Enterprise 2.0 is flawed. It is missing what made the social web to the social web - the people, not the technology.

I'm not sure this is entirely true, however it may be that the term coined by McAfee doesn't reflect how people want to use it or where they want to place emphasis. For example, in McAfee's 2006 paper he does say:

These new digital platforms for generating, sharing and refining information are already popular on the Internet, where they’re collectively labeled “Web 2.0” technologies. I use the term “Enterprise 2.0”to focus only on those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers.

I think that depending on the organisation, the organisational change related to Enterprise 2.0 is really either a reflection of the latent demand ("we need better tools!") or a disruption of existing industrial era hierarchical information flows ("Information is power!"). At the time McAfee warned us about the latter, but didn't really explore the demand side of the former.

However, its important to remember that McAfee placed Enterprise 2.0 in the context of improving the productivity of knowledge workers in the light of the failure of the previous generation of collaboration, information management and knowledge management tools (rather than organisational change because of some external driver). In a way I see McAfee's work as an extension of Tom Davenports ideas about Human-Centered Information Management from way back in 1994. The people are there, because people and the social web are really at the centre of the information systems we create - so lets give them tools that reflect that.

However, recasting Enterprise 2.0 as something that is just about people and organisational change is a different matter entirely. I have no problem with the subject matter, but I do wonder where the plain old discourse on the topic of "management" in our digital era ends and the buzz word of "Enterprise 2.0" begins. If instead we remove out expectations of McAfee and re-frame this discussion as a management issue it does serve as a reminder that this stuff is complex - the technology, organisational and people elements are related, not separate - and one size will never fit all.

Personally I apply a few innovation and change management concepts in my work:

• IMA's Accelerating Change Methodology (AIM);
• James Carlopio's change management model (see Changing Gears: The Strategic Implementation of Technology), which has origins in Rogers' innovation theory (see Diffusion of Innovations if you aren't familiar with this fantastic book); and
• Nambisan W, Agarwal R & Tanniru M, 1999, ‘Organizational mechanisms for enhancing user innovation in information technology', MIS Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 365-395.

Jodie Miners was asking about this following my earlier post about WIIFM. I realised that I had already covered this before in this post on my old blog.

Incidentally (and this is probably why it was top of mind) I'm planning on attending a 2 day Accelerating Change Methodology introduction program (it will be a refresher for me and a chance to hear about the change issues being faced by other organisations) in Sydney on the 16-17 September 2009. You can find out more about the course on the AIM site.

Last week I spoke with two organizations who had “KM problems”.  In both cases they found that associates were not filling out all the information into their system of record.  What resulted was an inability to look back at older cases and extract “knowledge” about the process to help train new associates.  It’s a common problem — associates were never motivated to fill out forms and stuff SharePoint with documents.  They were motivated to bring open cases to closure efficiently. Their respective approaches to the problem was to get new tools or to figure out new ways to mandate compliance.  I told both companies that their approach will not work and I explained why.

...It’s somewhat obvious to me when I  see the problem from the outside.  But one of my clients could not understand why a management edict in the form of “Thou shalt upload all documents to SharePoint in a timely manner” would not work.

Gil was actually blogging about a TEDxBoston presentation - so go read (and watch) that for the context of this quote. However, the point he makes above I like to simplify into what I call the WIIFM ("What's In It For Me?") gap. Its critical to examine this point from all levels in an organisation - corporately, through the management levels and finally the individuals involved. This is a three way gap between what the organisation wants as a whole, what the departments or internal groups involved want and what the individuals who will be affected want.

This perspective actually dove tails neatly into a couple of different change management models I use, one based on innovation theory and another based more pragmatically on addressing sponsorship 'holes' in the organisational structure.