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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

You’ve just moved into the CIO chair. Congratulations.

You spend the requisite month listening instead of talking, making no commitments, figuring out what’s going on. You find a department that operates through oral traditions and improvisation. It needs, in other words, a healthy dose of process.

What’s your next step?

Here’s what the answer isn’t: Design and implement great processes.

One of the stranger aspects of organizational change is that you can’t often fix a problem by trying to fix the problem. At least, you usually can’t fix problems directly, for two reasons. The first is that most of the problems you see are the symptoms of other, less apparent issues you don’t see. The second is that the number of levers you can pull and buttons you can push to influence the behavior of the organization you lead is surprisingly small.

If an organization is underperforming, its processes aren’t working as well as they should. This is a matter of definition: Process means how employees do their work.

That doesn’t mean you can fix an organization by fixing its processes. Far from it. If you want stronger processes, starting with process design doesn’t work very well. The buttons and levers lie elsewhere. Among the more useful:

  • Changing the business culture, to encourage a process state of mind. If you need an organization that’s more orderly — one that operates through well-defined, continuously improving processes — begin with culture change. Otherwise, everything else you try to do will wither and die, killed through the passive resistance and malicious obedience of employees who just don’t see the point and who like the less-bureaucratic way things are right now.
  • Educating process managers in the niceties of process management. Just as employees, left to their own devices, generally prefer informality to well-defined processes, process managers, left to their own devices, often prefer managing the work to managing the processes that manage the work.Nor is this necessarily a bad attitude. You can, in theory, manage processes by watching key performance indicators, dashboards, and exception reports without once interacting with a live human being. To manage the work you have to interact with the people who do it.If you want process to happen, process managers must learn the discipline of process management. If you want process to happen without doing more harm than good you’d better make sure they understand that process management isn’t an alternative to leading people — it’s a complement.
  • Fixing the policy manual, most often by throwing out most of your policies. If the policy manual is thick it almost always means compliance has replaced strategy as the force driving the company.It also means that whenever anything goes wrong, most managers instinctively try to prevent recurrence with a new rule. The result: A stifling, choking bureaucracy in which following the steps, filling out the forms and above all following the rules matter much more than achieving anything that resembles a useful result.Once you’ve finished clearing out the policy underbrush, institute one new policy: Whenever possible, institute a guideline instead of writing a policy. Guidelines do the same sort of work that policies do, but they leave enough flexibility to get the job done.
  • Reorganizing. Many executives reorganize the way Correge models change attire — frequently, as the mood takes them, to stay in fashion. Doing so has, as the saying goes, much the same effect as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. A roll of duct tape would be more useful.One reason the tool of reorganization is so often used incorrectly is that organizational structures are mis-represented whenever anyone draws them. Showing them as a hierarchy does a fine job of presenting reporting relationships. It fails to depict something far more important: An organizational structure is a set of boxes packed within bigger boxes set within even bigger boxes.The rule for business processes is straightforward: Processes break in proportion to the number and height of the organizational barriers they have to cross. The challenge for organizational designers is that however you organize, the total number of boxes … and therefore the number of barriers … won’t change very much.

    So when you reorganize you aren’t going to remove the barriers to all processes, because you can’t.

    All you’ll be able to do is to decide which processes you improve, and which you make more difficult.

    Choose carefully.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Dot one: Accenture, according to a recent article has taken the position that, as the title says, “SOA key to survival for businesses — Adoption will make you stronger and faster, expert says,” (Emmet Ryan, The Register, 3/15/2007). In it, Accenture’s David Nichols pulls no punches. His prediction: “Companies that evolve to this [SOA] will survive. Those that do not, will not.”

To support this assertion he hauls out the usual arguments about agility, athleticism and so on. He might even be right, assuming that the “huge undertaking” Accenture says is required to implement services oriented architecture includes (in addition to support from its consultants): Eliminating office politics and organizational silos, firing narcissistic executives, improving corporate governance, and implementing Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, Lean Theory of Constraints, or the Sigmoid Theory of Six Lean Constraints.

Depending on your company’s competitive circumstances, any one of these might easily be more important to its survival than implementing SOA (except for the last two, which I made up). For some companies, something as prosaic as changing advertising agencies deserves a higher priority than an SOA implementation.

Here’s one other salient fact presented in the article: Accenture has invested $450 million in SOA — internally and in its service offerings. Depending on whether you’re an admirer or a cynic, you’ll either figure Accenture has the courage of its convictions, or that it has a lot riding on clients hiring it to help them implement SOA.

Both explanations are plausible, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Anyway, this column isn’t about services oriented architecture or Accenture. It’s about dots.

Dot two: David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and his team published an article titled “Relationship between Funding Source and Conclusion among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles,” (PLoS Medicine, 1/9/2007).

Dr. Ludwig and his team compared the findings of 111 investigations into the nutritional consequences of drinking milk, juice and soft drinks — some industry-funded, the rest supported through independent grants. Dr. Ludwig’s team found that industry-funded research is more than seven times more likely to publish results favorable to the sponsor than independently funded research.

Imagine that.

Dr. Ludwig’s results should be unsurprising to anyone old enough to brush their own teeth. They matter because they make industry untrustworthiness official, not because we didn’t know this before. We’ve all become inured to the phenomenon: There are even those who defend the cigarette manufacturers that sponsored bogus research showing that cancer sticks are harmless, on the grounds that anyone with half a brain should have known to ignore it.

Connecting these two dots matters to those of us who toil in the trenches of IT management, or more generally in the trenches of business management, because un-sponsored research is hard to find and harder to distinguish from the other kind.

Accenture’s financial stake in SOA is stated. That isn’t usually the case. Take a look at any industry publication and see if the publisher clearly identifies the stories that started life as press releases. They don’t, but they should.

The research firms are no better. When the vendors they rate also subscribe to one or more of their very expensive services, any claim of impartiality must be considered questionable at best and disingenuous at worst.

And the situation is deteriorating. Once upon a time, independent test labs routinely compared the performance and features of just about every technology you can buy. These comparisons are becoming a faint, quaint memory, the victims of end-user license agreements (EULAs) that prohibit publication of performance data. That means in many cases the only data you can get comes from the manufacturer.

So the trade press publishes one sponsored study showing Windows is more reliable than Linux, followed by another sponsored study demonstrating the reverse. Yawn.

Subscribers to Keep the Joint Running know my preference for evidence-driven decision-making. Most of you share it. It’s hard when so much of the available evidence is tainted. The question is what you can do about it.

The answer is to be found in the Constitution, whose framers recognized the problem back in the 18th century. Recognizing that no source of information could be trusted they instead placed their trust in the marketplace of ideas — the principle that underlies the First Amendment to the Constitution.

You should do the same. In the absence of trustworthy sources, take your information from many. It’s the theory of the blogosphere: Out of enough noise, signal sometimes emerges.

It isn’t a wonderful answer. But it will have to do.

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