All Posts in Organizational Design

|In: Organizational Design|Last Updated:

A quick history of the United States:

If you’re running an IT organization, you’re probably coping and having a hard time doing it. IT has evolved from supporting core accounting, to all business functions, to PC-using autonomous end-users; to external, paying customers on the company’s website; to mobile apps, the company’s social media presence, its data warehouse, big-data storage and analytics … all while combatting an increasingly sophisticated and well-funded community of cyber attackers.

What hasn’t evolved is IT’s operating model — a description of the IT organization’s various moving parts and how they’re supposed to come together so the company gets the information technology it needs.

Your average, everyday CIO is trying to keep everything together applying disco-era “best practices” to the age of All of the Above.

Defining a complete IT All-of-the-Above operating model is beyond this week’s ambitions. Let’s start with something easier — just the piece that deals with the ever-accelerating flow of new technologies IT really ought to know about before any of its business collaborators within the enterprise take notice.

We’ve seen this movie before. PCs hit the enterprise and IT had no idea what to do about them. So it ignored them, which was probably best, as PCs unleashed a torrent of creativity throughout the world of business (assuming, of course, that torrents can be put on leashes in the first place). Had IT insisted on applying its disco-age governance practices, to PCs, all manner of newly automated business processes and practices would most probably still be managed using pencils and ledger sheets today.

Eventually, when PCs were sufficiently ubiquitous, IT got control of them, incorporating them into the enterprise technical architecture and developing the various administrative and security practices needed to keep the company’s various compliance enforcers happy, to the extent compliance enforcers are ever happy.

Then the World Wide Web made the Internet accessible to your average everyday corporate citizen, and IT had no idea what to do about it, either. So it did its best to ignore the web, resulting in another creativity torrent that had also presumably been subjected to IT’s leash laws.

It was a near point-for-point replay.

Now … make a list of every Digital and Gartner Hype Cycle technology you can think of, and ask yourself how IT has changed its operating model to prevent more ignore-and-coopt replays.

This is, it’s important to note, quite a different question from the ones that usually blindside CIOs: “What’s your x strategy?” where x is a specific currently hyped technology.

This is how most businesses and IT shops handle such things. But as COUNT(x) steadily increases, it’s understandable that your average CIO will acquire an increasingly bewildered visage, culminating in the entirely understandable decision to move the family to Vermont to grow cannabis in bulk while embracing a more bucolic lifestyle.

The view from here: Take a step back and solve the problem once instead of over and over. Establish a New Technologies Office. Its responsibilities:

  • Maintain a shortlist of promising new technologies — not promising in general, promising for your specific business.
  • Perform impact analyses for each shortlist technology and keep them current, taking into account your industry, marketplace and position in it, brand and customer communication strategy, products and product strategies, and so on. Include a forecast of when each technology will be ripe for use.
  • For each technology expected to be ripe within a year, develop an incubation and integration plan that includes first-business-use candidates and business cases, the logical IT (or, at times, non-IT) organizational home, and a TOWS impact analysis (threats, opportunities, weaknesses, strengths). Submit it to the project governance process.

Who should staff your new New Technologies Office? Make it for internal candidates only, and ask one question in your interviews: “What industry publications do you read on a regular basis?”

Qualified candidates will have an answer. Sadly, they’ll be in the minority. Most candidates don’t read.

They’re part of the problem you’re trying to solve.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I know I’m going to regret this … and I promise, I will connect it to practical business concerns.

Last week’s possibly satirical discussion of non-human entities we’ve created and given power over us to (“Who needs Skynet,” 2/12/2018) led to a lively discussion in the Comments section, including a controversy in juridical circles as to whether, when the First Amendment mentions “the press,” the protections are supposed to apply to the technology and its use or to the institutions commonly referred to as “the press.”

Or both.

My own conclusion: Failing to recognize the press-as-institution puts us at serious risk. Imagine politicians or lobbyists who don’t like what a member of the press-as-institution publishes. Without imposing any restriction on any individual’s use of press technology to disseminate information or opinions, those politicians could pass laws that drive that press organization into bankruptcy in retaliation.

But, if we do want to recognize the press-as-institution and protect it from governmental retaliation we’re faced with the fascination challenge of defining it.

Strict originalists face an even more challenging issue: As written, the First Amendment only protects speech and publication. It doesn’t even mention the activities needed to discover and gather the information the news media publishes.

Dumbass opinions, in this view, would enjoy constitutional protections. The careful research needed to publish accurate information would not.

Which got me thinking about The Post, its recounting of how the Pentagon Papers were brought to light, and how, in the end, revealing how the American public was misled into the Vietnam War arguably strengthened our government in the long term.

Which gets me to a point I’d like you to entertain even if you disagree with the above conclusion.

Unlike our government, there’s nothing in how corporations are chartered, organized, and run that provides any protections that would allowing employees to play a press-like role in their management.

I’m not talking about whistleblowers and the discovery of corporate wrongdoing. I’m talking about something far more mundane and potentially useful.

Imagine you discover a function within the company you work for is guilty of chronic but concealed idiocy. Nothing illegal or immoral, mind you. Just stupid.

Speaking of stupid, now imagine you try to bring the issue to the attention of a member of the ELT (Executive Leadership Team for those of you who haven’t heard the term before). Think they’ll thank you for your trouble?

Not most business executives, who largely rely on their chain of command for most of their information about What’s Going On Out There, supplemented by management dashboards and computer-generated reports.

Which often means they know much more about unimportant matters than about, for example, the stupidity factory you uncovered.

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, one of the most important skills for any business leader to develop is organizational listening. In the past I’ve suggested developing a variety of mechanisms, ranging from formal metrics to informal internal networking to accomplish this.

But this whole conversation about what constitutes the press leads me to wonder if a business would benefit by establishing the internal equivalent of the press-as-institution.

I’m not talking about adding a First-Amendment-like policy to the manual. While the results might be fun to watch, the most likely result would be a very poor signal-to-noise ratio.

I’m talking about establishing a formal internal news-gathering function, focused on discovering what managers don’t want the ELT to know and that ELT members might not want to know.

One of the most important (and most easily abused) functions performed by the press-as-institution is deciding what information is worthy of publication. Whether you get your information from newspapers or broadcast or cable news, you rely on them not only for the information they provide itself, but also to let you know what subjects you should be paying attention to.

A corporate internal news-gathering function would play a similar role. It would be a known place for employees at all levels to report what they’re aware of and think the ELT should be aware of, without incurring personal risk. It would also be responsible for sorting through it all, deciding what matters, and, when the situation calls for it, researching an issue in more depth.

It would have a regular slot on the ELT agenda — it wouldn’t need to fight for air time.

The ELT would be responsible for paying attention — for reading its metaphorical newspaper. And for instituting and enforcing the one rule critical for this organization’s success:

Don’t shoot the messenger.

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This isn’t something I’ve tried with a client and can attest to. I know of no business that’s tried this. If you do, please post a Comment to tell the rest of us about it. If you don’t, post a Comment anyway.

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