All Posts in Organizational Effectiveness

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

When I launched this column as Infoworld’s “IS Survival Guide back in 1996, it introduced the three bedrock principles of good management: (1) Customers … real, external, paying customers … define value; (2) form follows function; and (3) everyone involved must be aligned to a common purpose.

In the 28 years since then I’ve figured out, read about, and otherwise discovered one or two additional notions worth the attention of IT leaders and managers. But none of those notions have led me to jettison any of the big three I started with.

So I figured, as Keep the Joint Running winds down, it wouldn’t hurt to revisit them. And so …

Customers define value

Start by defining terms – the starting point for any rational conversation. And so, what is a customer? A customer is the entity that makes the buying decision about your company’s products and services. I say “entity” because while it might be a person who makes the buying decision, it also might be a committee, or, in these strange times it might be an AI. And so, “entity” it is.

Not the entity that uses them? No, although the sales process is a whole lot easier when the entity that uses a product or service also makes the buying decision.

So we need a different term for those who use, and as someone once pointed out, “user” sounds like someone who enjoys recreational pharmaceuticals. So for our purposes we’ll call those who use our products and services “consumers.”

We also need a term for those who provide the money used to buy products and services. Call them “wallets.” As anyone in sales will explain, everything is easier when the customer, consumer, and wallet are the same entity.

Then there’s the deficient oxymoron, “internal customer” – a term that conflates customers, consumers, and wallets. To be fair, IT does have these. But few IT leaders understand with clarity that the CIO’s internal customer is, personally, the person who can fire them or retain their services. Organizationally IT’s internal customer is the budget committee, which makes the decision as to how much the company should spend on information technology.

Form follows function

I was meeting with a CIO and his direct reports. My goal: Demonstrate to them that engaging my services for improving IT’s organizational performance by helping them construct a useful system of IT metrics was a good idea.

The CIO asked me a question: “What metrics do most IT organizations use?

I made the mistake of trying to answer his question. And worse, because I didn’t have any survey data to rely on, it was obvious I was tap-dancing, too.

The right answer was to answer a question with a question: Form follows function. Different IT organizations have different organizational performance goals. That’s what we needed to discuss.

“Form follows function” is the centerpiece of all successful designs, whether the subject is the organizational chart, the company’s compensation system, or minor matters like your company’s products and services. Start by nailing down “function” and take it from there. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what happens to stick.

Align everyone to a common purpose.

Imagine you’re the captain of a galley – one of the oar-powered warships the Greeks and Romans used in their naval battles.

Imagine your galley’s crew is divided into 50 port oarsmen and 50 starboard oarsmen; also imagine you have two direct reports (mates; call them the p-mate and s-mate). The p-mate thinks the galley should head in the bow’s direction, and instructs their 50 oarsmen to push their oar handles as hard as they can. The s-mate thinks stern-ward is the better direction and tells his half of the crew to pull their oars as hard as they can.

What does the galley do? It spins, of course.

So you reorganize. Instead of a p-mate and s-mate you decide to have a bow mate and stern mate. Now, the front 50 oarsmen push their oars as hard as they can; the rear 50 pull their oars as fast as they can. What’s the galley do? It churns, taking all the power exerted by the oarsmen and using it to neutralize the oarsmen’s efforts.

Don’t believe me? Check this out: Dragon Boat Racing Teams Compete In Epic Tug Of War (Storyful, Sports) – YouTube .

This is what happens when those in your organization aren’t aligned to a common purpose. Each does what they think is best, but because they have different goals they mostly neutralize each other’s best efforts.

Bob’s last word: Please don’t think leading and managing IT, or any other organization for that matter, is so simple that three core principles are enough to get you by. Enough? No. But they’re a pretty good place to start.

Comments

|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should stay out of politics and current events; certainly, if I do, I shouldn’t contribute to our current state of tribalism by affiliating with any political tribe.

But I have to, because (Warning: Breaking Political News follows) in case you missed it, the inmates really are trying to run the asylum. Only they’re failing; also, I’m not being fair to the non-metaphorical asylums, let alone their inmates.

Call me naïve; I can’t help thinking that if we could limit every inmate to statements that are factually correct, then our asylum’s governance couldn’t help but improve.

No, this isn’t a particularly novel sentiment. Worse, merely bemoaning that our public discourse has been polluted by Jewish Space Lasers and preposterous braggadocio about power poles and power lines. doesn’t accomplish very much.

Bemoaning is useless. Fortunately, I think I’ve just designed a way to leverage artificial intelligence technologies to improve the quality of our great nation’s political dialog.

It starts with an ankle bracelet.

But not just any ankle bracelet. This one wouldn’t track its wearer’s location to make sure they don’t violate the terms of their parole.

This one would track the factualness of its wearer’s statements. On uttering something completely or mostly false, the ankle bracelet would emit a deafening sound effect (ah-ooooo-ga!(?)) along with a loud voice yelling “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” or something equally pithy. And unless the wearer immediately retracted the statement it would be ‘posted (what used to be “tweeted”) along with a snarky and disparaging commentary.

The goal would be to humiliate any and every public servant who doesn’t respect basic honest discourse.

Who would have to wear one of these undecorative but useful pieces of information technology?

That would be anyone and everyone who holds or aspires to holding elective or high-level appointive office.

But … I can hear critics complain … wouldn’t this violate the office-holder’s first amendment rights?

I don’t think so, for two reasons.

The first: Nobody (and nothing) stops anyone from saying or publishing anything. The magic AI gadget would be responsive, not preventive.

And second: Very much like a driver’s license, we can define running for office as implied consent.

Now I’m the first to caution that machine-learning-style AI insights aren’t completely reliable. The KJR Honesty-Assessment Ankle Bracelet would only be as reliable as its training data.

A technology and process like this would certainly require an appeals process. We might even imagine that this appeals process would be fair, with published retractions when necessary, and with the cost of investigating the appeal paid by the bracelet manufacturer if the appeal is affirmed, but … fair is fair … paid by the offender if the bracelet’s assessment is upheld.

Bob’s last word: This week’s screed might strike you as satire. Satire was, in fact, my plan.

But as long-time readers know I’ve been warning about the dangers of intellectual relativism and the organizational importance of a culture of honest inquiry for a very long time now, and recent events just reinforce that we as a society need to do something, and the fact-checkers we have in place, no matter how good they are, just don’t scale up enough to cope with the scope of the problem..

I’m not yet convinced we need to do anything quite this radical. But a concerted effort to reinforce the importance of factualness in our public dialog? Absolutely. A process that ridicules, lambasts, embarrasses, and otherwise humiliates the propagandists who increasingly control our public dialog?

Sign me up!.

Comments