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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

“Patriotism,” explained Samuel Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In a less famous rebuttal Ambrose Bierce disagreed, insisting that it is, instead, the first.

CIOs aren’t, for the most part, scoundrels. Desperate, perhaps, but not scoundrels. It appears that reorganization, not patriotism, is what they resort to first.

We’re in the home stretch of the integrated IS plan, and the subject is how your department is organized. Here’s the first sentence of your plan for next year: “Since we’ve demonstrated repeatedly that reorganizations cause more problems than they solve, this year we will focus on making the organization we have work more effectively.”

There are situations that call for top-to-bottom reorganization. If the company strategy has changed dramatically, requiring radically different work efforts than before, major changes may be necessary. If so, they should be the result of a careful analysis of how you plan to get work done in the future. Reorganizations should, in other words, be your last resort.

Not your first.

We’ve covered the disadvantages of reorganizations in this space before. (See “How not to fix IS,” April 27, 1998). To recap, major reorganizations distract employees from real work, eliminate risk-taking, and metaphorically raise the walls between departments. Reorganizations are supposed to break down barriers to getting work done, but invariably they raise at least as many as they eliminate.

This year you aren’t going to do that. Instead, you’re going to look for all of the factors that keep the organization you have from working well. How? Just ask your employees. They know, and they’re probably dying to tell you, not necessarily in flattering language.

Then figure out what you’re going to do about these barriers to working well.

Some of the most common problems are leadership issues in disguise. We’ll address those in the section to be discussed next week. In the section on organization you’ll address mechanical problems, such as:

  • Overemphasis on organizational boundaries: Any emphasis is overemphasis, so this problem never goes away. You have to have an organizational chart. The moment it inhibits employees, it’s a problem. Encourage and reward an attitude of “never mind who owns it – we need to get this done.”
  • Competing financial goals: I know it’s hard to believe, but in some companies each manager has a budget and is rewarded by his or her performance against it. Yes, it’s true – some companies encourage managers to pad their budgets, which is always at the expense of other departments. The best budget-seller wins. If my bonus depends on my financial results, think I’m going to help you out?
  • The wrong groups: Over time, some groups outlive their usefulness. Over time, new requirements call for the creation of new groups. While massive reorganizations usually cause more problems than they solve, continual grooming of your organization makes all kinds of sense. The trick is to do this without creating organizational winners and losers, because employees who see organizational change as a risk focus on keeping their heads down and staying out of trouble, not on getting the job done.
  • Communication barriers: Among all the possible barriers to communication, three stand out. The first is physical: cubicle walls are too high, people who need to collaborate work on different floors or in different buildings, and so on. If possible, get people who work together a lot nearer each other.

The second barrier is psychological: Shyness is common among technical folk. Create lots of situations where people who wouldn’t normally work together have a chance to interact.

The third barrier, following the chain of command, is just stupid. The chain of command is for giving work direction. If the only way Fred Smith can talk to Irene Jones is for Fred to first talk to you so you can talk to Irene’s boss to set everything up … who’s going to bother?

No matter how you’re organized, your organization will facilitate some work and impede the rest. You’ll never fix it by reorganizing. Instead, plan to eliminate as many of the impediments to cooperation as you can.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

In my first exposure to business process re-engineering, our chosen consultant explained how Information Systems is “just like a factory.” We have a process for understanding the products we’re supposed to create (systems requirements analysis), another process for designing them (systems design), one for building them (systems development) and one for distributing them to our “customers” (operations). Since factory and systems processes line up one for one, IS is a factory, right?

And it is, except for everything we do. I could probably figure out a one-to-one correspondence between a factory and human courtship rituals, but that doesn’t mean human courtship is a factory either. (Let’s agree to not explore the parallels.)

In our ongoing quest to improve ourselves, many of us have tried to apply process redesign to IS, and for the most part the results haven’t been pretty. The biggest problem has been a misunderstanding about what constitutes a process. It’s a process if you do it over and over again. It’s an ad hoc task if you do it once or infrequently. Carefully designing and documenting processes for handling ad hoc tasks is pointless.

This week we continue to create our integrated IS plan, zooming in on the core processes of IS. Your first step is to identify the core processes that most need fixing and include in the plan initiatives to improve them. Improving them is important because employees only have five choices in how they get their work done. They can:

1. Improvise constantly because there is no well-defined process.

2. Slavishly follow a poorly designed process that leads to mediocre results.

3. Fight with a poorly designed process that interferes with achieving excellent results.

4. Improvise constantly, ignoring the well-designed process that would facilitate the creation of high-quality results.

5. Follow a well-designed process to create high-quality results.

It isn’t a core process unless you do it over and over again, so the process you instinctively thought of first — systems development — is rarely worth your time and attention. (You buy whenever you can, building new applications only when you’re desperate.) If you’re a typical IS organization, your core processes are vendor/product selection, systems integration (very different processes from systems development), systems maintenance, end-user support, and data center operations.

Since you can’t fix everything, choose the one or two processes that are broken the worst and include initiatives to fix them in your integrated plan.

How can you tell if a process is broken? Simple — your performance measures for that process don’t show an improvement trend. Don’t have process performance measures? Your integrated plan just got another entry: “Develop process performance measures.” Just remember:

  • What you can’t measure, you can’t manage, but when you mismeasure, you mismanage.
  • Measure what’s important, not what’s easy to measure. The two are mutually exclusive because the more important something is, the more subjective and less measurable it will be.

(Please note: Performance measures are for managing processes, not people, so focus on creating process measures, not staff performance measures. They’re two very different issues.)

Underlying all of your core processes are a few important organizational capabilities. I’m constantly surprised at how many IS organizations aren’t very good at decision-making, project management, data modeling and data management, systems library management, and training, but it’s true nonetheless. If you’re deficient in these capabilities, you won’t be able to improve your processes, so make sure your integrated plan addresses any problems with them.

Not everything is a process, no process fits every situation, and no process is good enough to survive employees who neither understand it nor care about its success. Process isn’t everything.

Saddling your employees with bad processes is like handicapping them with handcuffs and leg-irons, though, so make sure you give them processes that help them get their work done instead.

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