All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|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.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

We live in the information age, or so I’m told. We’re bombarded with the stuff — it’s kind of like cosmic rays in that respect — and we’re spending an ever-increasing amount of time and energy dealing with it all.

I’m not at all sure we’re really living in the information age. Information is defined as the stuff that reduces uncertainty, and most of what I’m bombarded with is marketing material, political speeches, redundant stories generated through the process of herd-journalism, and overheard descriptions of what was on Jerry Springer last night.

Information age? There’s little that reduces uncertainty. It’s more the age of noise. Whatever it is, though, it isn’t the decision age, which is why most IS Strategic Plans produce three-ring binders that sit on the shelf gathering dust.

Since June, in fits and spurts, this space has presented a framework for an integrated IS plan. Not a strategic plan, but an integrated plan. The difference between the two is that a strategic plan ignores the day-to-day realities of leading IS. Why bother?

An integrated IS plan describes what you’re really going to do next year (and further in the future), putting your strategic goals and how you’ll survive until the future gets here in a single context where they don’t compete for attention. Since it describes what you’re really going to do, it presents decisions, not just information.

To recap, we began by exploring and documenting the company’s strategic, tactical, and infrastructural goals, presenting them in the context of the programs that will be needed to achieve them. We then reviewed your technical architecture to determine how it needs to be reinforced, improved, and extended so as to support the programs defined in the first section.

Now it’s time to take on those pesky human beings who work for you and who will be doing (or failing to do) all the work. In several upcoming columns we’ll review the topics you should cover in your integrated plan.

The human dimension — the human factors plan — divides into three sub-plans, covering processes, leadership, and organization.

Processes are how people get work done. No, that’s too facile. Processes, or at least the ones you care about, are how people do repeating work — stuff they do over and over again. Your process plan lists the key work of your organization, identifies which processes you most need to define or improve, and sets the basic direction for how you’re going to improve them.

Leadership sets direction and gets people to do the work. Leadership establishes goals, holds employees accountable, makes sure they have the right skills, energizes them, makes sure they’re fairly compensated, and otherwise deals with their needs as individuals. A lot of the work done in IS happens outside the boundaries of defined and documented processes, so a key role of leadership is creating an environment that encourages employees to figure out how to deal with situations as they arise.

Then there’s the ever-popular organizational design. You have to have one, I suppose — employees need to know to whom they report and who is responsible for the various kinds of decisions that have to get made. The main role of the organizational chart, though, is to define what my work isn’t. Designing your organizational chart comes last, and it should be pretty obvious once you’ve figured out everything else. The two most important things you can do with your organizational chart are to (a) focus attention on everything else; and (b) don’t change it any more often than you absolutely have to. Improving your organizational design doesn’t do all that much to help people get work done, but reorganizing creates lots of barriers.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Creating a coherent plan that hangs together is a lot of work. That’s one reason empowerment is important. The more time you spend planning, the less you have for important decisions like whether Joan should be allowed to get a new mouse for her three-year-old computer.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ll get there, but first we have to talk about processes … and that’s what we’ll do next week.

Comments