Organizational Thinking
A place to put my writing and thinking about organizations, change, transformation, and the general puzzle of people living and working in groups. Chris Francovich, Ed.D coherence@adelphia.netSunday, April 17, 2005
Reconceiving Aspects of the IS/IT Function in Light of Global Change
Seeing Beyond Technical Solutions
Efficient and effective management of the system development lifecycle is the standard against which most IS design efforts are compared. However, the effective management of technical solutions does not adequately ensure that the technical solutions crafted at the strategic and business area levels will ‘take’ at the applications or performance level that the system is ultimately dependent upon.
Typically there is a fundamental mismatch between systems as idealized by designers and systems as used by front line workers. This problem is further complicated by the increase in cooperative work being done at the performance level. This cooperative work is the result of numerous factors but chief among them is the pressure on firms to work with a leaner staff and at the same time remain competitive and continuously increase productive capacity. Global markets and a general trend toward rapid adaptation to market trends indicate that this state of affairs is not likely to change anytime soon.
The basic nature of this split is illustrated by trends in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The HCI community is increasingly bedeviled by the fact that both settings and the users in the settings are heterogeneous in both their understanding of systems and the applications that the systems are put to (Bannon, 1997). This problem has seen the increase (at least in Europe) of new frameworks of cooperative design that entail a greater degree of open ended design work with a greater degree of dependency on work place variables. Nonetheless development continues apace in the U.S. using, for example, old models for the development of GroupWare products that hit the same user ‘wall’ that many standard IT products have encountered.
One response in the emerging field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is the use of a new set of tools and techniques in the development of systems oriented toward relatively large scale implementation of complex information systems (Project Report - CSCW Symposium, 1996). Among these new methods are the practice of ethnographic research, system wide coordination of change initiatives, using the Intranet capabilities to funnel just in time user requirements information to system developers, and the development of ongoing feedback loops (also utilizing Intranet capabilities) connecting front line practice with strategic leadership and various IS/IT and production based modeling efforts.
Ideally a firm would use a variety of tools and techniques along a continuum ranging from the technical and abstract to the social and context embedded for the design, implementation, and ongoing use of information technology and systems applications. Unfortunately the capacity of organizations in general and the IS/IT field in particular to see the organization and its practices as a whole is compromised by political infighting and/or disciplinary specialization and compartmentalization. These patterns are difficult to change. But change they must – the pressures on firms to respond quickly and effectively to external perturbations as a whole are increasing.
A continuum outlining the range of possibilities is captured below and reflects the increased focus on context in general and the development of tools oriented toward making informal aspects of the work place explicit in the service of system design.
Assuming an organization can both accommodate and connect elements along this continuum then that firm will find an enhanced capacity to adapt as a whole to both external and internal organizational changes. From this perspective it would be fair to say that the IS/IT and organizational system as a whole functions in a manner similar to the human nervous system. There are both afferent (feedback to the strategic center) and efferent (direction to the distributed functions and processes) impulses continuously coursing through the firm. This, however, can only occur if the firm embraces the task of incorporating the informal and context dependent performance culture with the technical and rational aspects of system and organizational design.
A Design Framework for Reconfiguring IS/IT Functions
Assuming that the organization is in pursuit of holistic solutions to organizational problems a coherent framework for linking both real and virtual aspects of the organization is needed. The framework proposed here has its roots in the organizational science literature focusing on organizational structure and the management of knowledge (Jensen & Meckling, 1996; Nonaka, 1997; Schein, 1997), organizational and information systems dynamics (Goguen, 1997; Hall & Moss, 1997; Senge, 1990), and the theoretical foundations of social learning (Agre, 1997; Eraut, 1994; Maturana & Varela, 1987; Lave, 1988; and Piaget, 1971). The common thread of this design foundation is a more or less universal recognition that systems thinking (in the sense that dynamic wholes must be considered) is an absolute prerequisite for the development of tools and techniques to help understand and mange the 21st century organization.
Organizational Structure
Traditional organizational structures are function based and hierarchical. This is a plain fact and the transition from this traditional structure to the ‘flatter’ organization popularized in management books and articles is probably a long time in coming. This is true for several reasons. First there is an historical habit and pattern in organizational life that will change slowly if at all and only as new and progressive experiences are gradually incorporated into the overall culture. Second, the coordination, technology, and basic competencies required in a ‘flat’ organizational structure are difficult and complicated issues to engage (this document being an example of the difficulty in moving toward whole systems design). Consequently the design model used in organizational change initiatives should reflect the somewhat intractable nature of hierarchical organizations but also include processes and mechanisms that will sow the seeds of gradual but progressive change toward a distributed, process based, and highly adaptable organization. The work of Rummler and Brache (1995) is important in this regard for they include in their process based model a structural template with a lot of face validity and enormous explanatory power in both modeling and participating in the organizational as a whole. Their conception is central to the model outlined graphically below.
A key task for organizations to take up is the translation of the horizontal informal communications (knowledge) within work groups to the verticle formal channels that ideally flow across functions. Most of our current technology and expertise is devoted to working with the verticle flow of information.
For information systems work the next graphic relates the key categories of the Rummler/Brache model to recent work in IS/IT design and knowledge management.
What is required to begin the development of a design strategy as illustrated above is a commitment to seeing the whole organization and doing the necessary work in the performance realm taking full measure of the informal work culture and the complexity of situated work. The key features of this effort are the work place research components and the management structures to support the inclusion of this informal but highly meaningful knowledge into the strategic and process functions of the organization. Work of this sort will bear fruit if the leadership in the organization is prepared to make the long term commitment to develop a holistic management and process model for the firm. Eventually all the work of the organization will be done in reference to the cybernetic and virtual information and knowledge flows that this model suggests.
References
Agre, P. (1997). Computation and human experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bannon, L. J. (1997). Dwelling in the "great divide": The case for HCI and CSCW. In G. C. Bowker, S. Leigh-Starr, W. Turner & Gasser Les (Eds.), Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the great divide (pp. 355-379). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Eraut, M. (1994). Developing professional knowledge and competence. London: The Falmer Press.
Goguen, J. A. (1997). Toward a social, ethical, theory of information. In G. C. Bowker, S. Leigh-Starr, W. Turner & Gasser Les (Eds.), Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the great divide (pp. 27-56). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Hall, D., & Moss, J. (1997). Helping organiztions and employees adapt. Organizational Dynamics, 26(3), 311-332.
Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1996). Specific and general knowledge, and organizational structure. In P. S. Myers (Ed.), Knowledge management and organizational design (pp. 17-39). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Lave Jean. (1988). Cognition in practice. Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1987). The tree of knowledge; The biological roots of human understanding. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Nonaka, I. (1997). A new organizational structure. In L. Prusak (Ed.), Knowledge in Organizations (pp. 99-135). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Project Report - CSCW Symposium. (1996). Systems development and co-operative work: Methods and techniques. WWW, http://comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ambleside.html.
Rummler, G. A., & Brache, A. P. (1995 2nd Ed.). Improving performance: How to manage the white space on the organization chart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Schein, E. (1997). Three cultures of management: The key to organizational learning in the 21st century. WWW, http://learning.mit.edu/res/wp/three.html. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management.
Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York: Doubleday.
Efficient and effective management of the system development lifecycle is the standard against which most IS design efforts are compared. However, the effective management of technical solutions does not adequately ensure that the technical solutions crafted at the strategic and business area levels will ‘take’ at the applications or performance level that the system is ultimately dependent upon.
Typically there is a fundamental mismatch between systems as idealized by designers and systems as used by front line workers. This problem is further complicated by the increase in cooperative work being done at the performance level. This cooperative work is the result of numerous factors but chief among them is the pressure on firms to work with a leaner staff and at the same time remain competitive and continuously increase productive capacity. Global markets and a general trend toward rapid adaptation to market trends indicate that this state of affairs is not likely to change anytime soon.
The basic nature of this split is illustrated by trends in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The HCI community is increasingly bedeviled by the fact that both settings and the users in the settings are heterogeneous in both their understanding of systems and the applications that the systems are put to (Bannon, 1997). This problem has seen the increase (at least in Europe) of new frameworks of cooperative design that entail a greater degree of open ended design work with a greater degree of dependency on work place variables. Nonetheless development continues apace in the U.S. using, for example, old models for the development of GroupWare products that hit the same user ‘wall’ that many standard IT products have encountered.
One response in the emerging field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is the use of a new set of tools and techniques in the development of systems oriented toward relatively large scale implementation of complex information systems (Project Report - CSCW Symposium, 1996). Among these new methods are the practice of ethnographic research, system wide coordination of change initiatives, using the Intranet capabilities to funnel just in time user requirements information to system developers, and the development of ongoing feedback loops (also utilizing Intranet capabilities) connecting front line practice with strategic leadership and various IS/IT and production based modeling efforts.
Ideally a firm would use a variety of tools and techniques along a continuum ranging from the technical and abstract to the social and context embedded for the design, implementation, and ongoing use of information technology and systems applications. Unfortunately the capacity of organizations in general and the IS/IT field in particular to see the organization and its practices as a whole is compromised by political infighting and/or disciplinary specialization and compartmentalization. These patterns are difficult to change. But change they must – the pressures on firms to respond quickly and effectively to external perturbations as a whole are increasing.
A continuum outlining the range of possibilities is captured below and reflects the increased focus on context in general and the development of tools oriented toward making informal aspects of the work place explicit in the service of system design.
Assuming an organization can both accommodate and connect elements along this continuum then that firm will find an enhanced capacity to adapt as a whole to both external and internal organizational changes. From this perspective it would be fair to say that the IS/IT and organizational system as a whole functions in a manner similar to the human nervous system. There are both afferent (feedback to the strategic center) and efferent (direction to the distributed functions and processes) impulses continuously coursing through the firm. This, however, can only occur if the firm embraces the task of incorporating the informal and context dependent performance culture with the technical and rational aspects of system and organizational design.
A Design Framework for Reconfiguring IS/IT Functions
Assuming that the organization is in pursuit of holistic solutions to organizational problems a coherent framework for linking both real and virtual aspects of the organization is needed. The framework proposed here has its roots in the organizational science literature focusing on organizational structure and the management of knowledge (Jensen & Meckling, 1996; Nonaka, 1997; Schein, 1997), organizational and information systems dynamics (Goguen, 1997; Hall & Moss, 1997; Senge, 1990), and the theoretical foundations of social learning (Agre, 1997; Eraut, 1994; Maturana & Varela, 1987; Lave, 1988; and Piaget, 1971). The common thread of this design foundation is a more or less universal recognition that systems thinking (in the sense that dynamic wholes must be considered) is an absolute prerequisite for the development of tools and techniques to help understand and mange the 21st century organization.
Organizational Structure
Traditional organizational structures are function based and hierarchical. This is a plain fact and the transition from this traditional structure to the ‘flatter’ organization popularized in management books and articles is probably a long time in coming. This is true for several reasons. First there is an historical habit and pattern in organizational life that will change slowly if at all and only as new and progressive experiences are gradually incorporated into the overall culture. Second, the coordination, technology, and basic competencies required in a ‘flat’ organizational structure are difficult and complicated issues to engage (this document being an example of the difficulty in moving toward whole systems design). Consequently the design model used in organizational change initiatives should reflect the somewhat intractable nature of hierarchical organizations but also include processes and mechanisms that will sow the seeds of gradual but progressive change toward a distributed, process based, and highly adaptable organization. The work of Rummler and Brache (1995) is important in this regard for they include in their process based model a structural template with a lot of face validity and enormous explanatory power in both modeling and participating in the organizational as a whole. Their conception is central to the model outlined graphically below.
A key task for organizations to take up is the translation of the horizontal informal communications (knowledge) within work groups to the verticle formal channels that ideally flow across functions. Most of our current technology and expertise is devoted to working with the verticle flow of information.
For information systems work the next graphic relates the key categories of the Rummler/Brache model to recent work in IS/IT design and knowledge management.
What is required to begin the development of a design strategy as illustrated above is a commitment to seeing the whole organization and doing the necessary work in the performance realm taking full measure of the informal work culture and the complexity of situated work. The key features of this effort are the work place research components and the management structures to support the inclusion of this informal but highly meaningful knowledge into the strategic and process functions of the organization. Work of this sort will bear fruit if the leadership in the organization is prepared to make the long term commitment to develop a holistic management and process model for the firm. Eventually all the work of the organization will be done in reference to the cybernetic and virtual information and knowledge flows that this model suggests.
References
Agre, P. (1997). Computation and human experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bannon, L. J. (1997). Dwelling in the "great divide": The case for HCI and CSCW. In G. C. Bowker, S. Leigh-Starr, W. Turner & Gasser Les (Eds.), Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the great divide (pp. 355-379). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Eraut, M. (1994). Developing professional knowledge and competence. London: The Falmer Press.
Goguen, J. A. (1997). Toward a social, ethical, theory of information. In G. C. Bowker, S. Leigh-Starr, W. Turner & Gasser Les (Eds.), Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the great divide (pp. 27-56). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Hall, D., & Moss, J. (1997). Helping organiztions and employees adapt. Organizational Dynamics, 26(3), 311-332.
Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1996). Specific and general knowledge, and organizational structure. In P. S. Myers (Ed.), Knowledge management and organizational design (pp. 17-39). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Lave Jean. (1988). Cognition in practice. Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1987). The tree of knowledge; The biological roots of human understanding. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Nonaka, I. (1997). A new organizational structure. In L. Prusak (Ed.), Knowledge in Organizations (pp. 99-135). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Project Report - CSCW Symposium. (1996). Systems development and co-operative work: Methods and techniques. WWW, http://comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ambleside.html.
Rummler, G. A., & Brache, A. P. (1995 2nd Ed.). Improving performance: How to manage the white space on the organization chart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Schein, E. (1997). Three cultures of management: The key to organizational learning in the 21st century. WWW, http://learning.mit.edu/res/wp/three.html. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management.
Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York: Doubleday.
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