Organizational Design – Page 36 – IS Survivor Publishing

To lock or not to lock – it’s a deeper question than you thought

I had a plan.

Last week’s column listed three factors to take into account in deciding how far you should open up or lock down desktop PCs: The company’s size, how heavily it is regulated, and the role of the individual employee. Bigger, more heavily regulated companies tend to need more tightly controlled PCs. The same is true of employee roles that are more regimented and less flexible.

I’d planned to continue this week with three more factors. One was going to be company strategy. Specifically, companies that sell strongly commoditized products — products whose only differentiation is price — have to focus heavily on cost control, meaning lockdown makes sense.

So much for planning: On reflection, I don’t buy it.

I don’t care if your company manufactures cinder blocks, or buys and sells lentils. It doesn’t matter if the product itself is a commodity. Any company that wants to enjoy continued success needs to be on a constant lookout for new and better ways of getting things done.

There are two ways to go about finding these improvements. One is top-down planning. The other is bottom-up initiative. Since the business case for opening up PCs is built on the importance of bottom-up initiative, this is a subject we need to explore in depth.

Top-down planning has the advantage over bottom-up initiative when it comes to engineering elegance. Since the only way to optimize the whole is to sub-optimize the parts, business leaders should engineer the corporation from the top down, according to a carefully rendered program of progressive decomposition — from core process to sub-processes to sub-sub-processes to activities to tasks to procedures, all carefully orchestrated and controlled.

It’s the organization as machine. The gears mesh, the shafts turn, the subassemblies integrate, and everything hums. IT locks down the desktops because any variation from the grand design can only optimize a part at the expense of the whole.

Now imagine you’re an employee who performs actual, for example, work. You know how the work gets done because you do it every day. You see an opportunity — a way to do it better.

Which is too bad, because better people than you have already designed the whole company. There’s no room for bottom-up initiative. How could there be? Change anywhere could unbalance the whole machine.

Sure sounds convincing, doesn’t it? Well, no, it doesn’t. Company processes aren’t as carefully engineered as all that. They aren’t perfectly optimized from a global, top-down perspective.

The situation is messier than that.

In a typical company, core processes … the processes that form the heart of the business … are well-engineered and well supported by the company’s enterprise systems. It’s hard to escape this conclusion because by definition, a company’s core processes are what give it a competitive advantage. That being the case, they will have received the most attention, brainpower, and investment.

Move away from the core processes and you typically find solutions that are more ad hoc in nature. That makes sense. Company leaders should invest more time and attention in competitive differentiators than in business responsibilities that support business responsibilities that support business responsibilities that support competitive differentiators.

So we’d expect to find more opportunities for bottom-up innovation in non-core areas of responsibility than in core processes. This logic dictates a policy that locks down most rigidly the PCs of employees who play primary roles in core and near-core business functions and processes. The PCs of employees whose responsibilities are farther away from the core would be more open.

This makes for a neat, tidy little business paradigm, not too different from Geoffrey Moore’s “Keep the core and outsource the rest.”

Don’t trust tidy little business paradigms. Too often they are on the wrong side of the line that separates the simple from the simplistic.

Here’s one of the nasty little conundrums (conundra?) that get in the way. Imagine your company’s core and supporting processes really are carefully engineered and perfectly balanced. If that’s the case, then in addition to perfect optimization, the company will have achieved perfect stagnation and stasis.

Look at any large organization that’s optimized from the top down and you’ll find it almost has to discourage front-line innovation. How do you innovate in a world where, when Manufacturing sneezes, Marketing has to say “gesundheit”?

The price to be paid for tight integration is rigidity, and a powerful resistance to change. Today’s efficiency almost guarantees tomorrow’s obsolescence.

On the other hand, advocating inefficiency and poor business integration just doesn’t sit very well.

Do you still think desktop policy is a simple matter?

Think again.

The portal

In 1980, a 3278 green-screen terminal cost (as I recall) about $6,000, not including the mainframe it attached to.

Along came the PC. It cost half that, and was self-sufficient.

IT tried to keep them out. They put too much power in the hands of ignorant users and you couldn’t do serious computing on them anyway. Yes, the IT authorities made both arguments, simultaneously, and didn’t even blush.

PCs leaked in despite IT’s opinion. Distributed computing leaked in too. The economics made them unavoidable. Various pundits claim otherwise, but they are comparing the costs of PCs and distributed computing with the competition-deflated costs of mainframe computing, not the pre-PC high-margin early-1980s price tag.

Fast-forward to now. You can buy a 150 gigabyte drive for less than $100. For another hundred bucks you can buy a USB external disk to back it up.

For 150 backed-up gigabytes, IT would charge $1,500 per year.

From my backup drive I can restore any file in five minutes. IT would take more than a day. Self-service? Forget it.

In 1980, IT completely locked down the 3278 terminal, by definition. IT now locks down the PC, not by definition but by choice. Meanwhile, at home, people install whatever they please, and in spite of what the doomsayers tell you, few run into insurmountable problems. Those who do sheepishly ask their teen-aged children to help them. Their teenagers give them the same eyeball rolls they get from the Help Desk staff at work, but much better service.

Nothing in this comparison is fair. Fair has nothing to do with it. My PC at home beckons, saying “Yes, you can do that too.” My PC at work says, “No you can’t.” Your end-users experience that contrast every working day.

Preaching to them that “it’s a business computer, to be used only for business purposes,” isn’t persuasive, because they know something we in IT often ignore: It isn’t really a computer.

Oh, technically that’s what it is, but technically doesn’t matter. The PC is a portal to a universe of possibilities. While the word “cyberspace” has fallen out of use, the idea of cyberspace is alive, well, and built into the perception of everyone who looks at a screen while manipulating a keyboard and mouse.

It might be time … past time … for IT to look at its job in a new way.

Try this on for size: Imagine you ran IT as if it embraced this PC-as-portal perspective. As if IT’s job was to manage one corner of that universe of possibilities.

What would you do differently?

Let’s take it a step further. Let’s look, not just at the PC but about work as a whole from the employee’s point of view. That shouldn’t be too hard. We in IT are employees too, when we aren’t busy being IT professionals.

From the employee’s point of view the job is, in addition to being a way to earn a living, a place for: social interaction; developing the self-esteem that comes from creating value and achieving important things; structuring time and staying occupied; exercising their brains and keeping them from becoming stale.

Few employees draw a hard boundary around their work life, keeping it psychologically distinct and independent of the rest of their life. They are the same people in the office as out of the office.

We in IT are stuck in a 1950s industrial view of the workplace. Much of the workforce is post-industrial in perspective. They don’t “achieve work/life balance.” They just live their lives, wherever they happen to be at the moment — sometimes in the office, sometimes out of it.

In the office they research reports, create presentations, check their investment portfolios, answer business e-mail, answer personal e-mail, make business phone calls, answer personal phone calls.

Out of the office they think about the reports, edit the presentations, check their investment portfolios, answer business e-mail, answer personal e-mail, make business phone calls, and answer personal phone calls.

Employees live a significant part of their lives in the universe of possibilities they reach through their PCs, their Blackberries, the Treos, their iPhones.

The economic gap between self-sufficient computing and central IT that drove the PC revolution is back. The existential gulf separating IT’s perception of work from the employee perception of work is new, and wider. We in IT had better figure it out, or business users will figure it out without us.

Because for us, a PC is an expensive, hard-to-support business resource. But for them it’s a portal to an entire universe they can buy at Costco for a few hundred bucks.