Dysfunctional organisations can’t do tech
A new boss joins the organisation. He’s from a completely different industry, and he doesn’t get why things are being done the way they are. Because of this, he assumes that people are either stupid, or working an angle, and in either case are fundamentally untrustworthy. He launches a high-profile technology project. What could possibly go wrong?
The project has ambitious targets and features all the latest buzzwords. The vendor’s implementation team are bought in at eye-watering day rates, and they produce long, impenetrable documents laden with upward-trending graphs. Because regular staff aren’t trusted, none of this is shared with them.
In the delivery phase of the project people start to have a strange, haunted look about them. Each step forward uncovers more and more costs as unplanned dependencies are discovered.
There’s a final scrabble to get the thing out of the door and get the project closed down. In its final weeks, in-house staff, roped-in at the last minute, cobble together some “temporary” fixes which barely meet user needs. It’s enough to pass testing, which isn’t very thorough anyway, and everyone’s just glad the whole thing is over.
Then, the boss meets the CEO of another vendor at a conference, and the whole process starts all over again. Except this time, the new product has got to be integrated with the last one as well.
Our all-too-believable workplace has no hope of successfully implementing what they’re trying to. However many attempts they make, things just won’t work as promised. It’s not because the products chosen are bad, or because the IT staff are incompetent. It’s not even because the boss doesn’t understand the work of the business. It’s because technology is just a tool, and tools don’t do anything without the people to use them skillfully. The way people work together is a process, whether it’s formally agreed in an SOP or organically negotiated in an agile team.
I love a good law of IT, and there’s few as insightful as Mel Conway’s:
“organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
This means that anything the IT department creates is going to be constrained by the way that IT department works together. If everyone gets on well and work flows smoothly, then the things they make will be a pleasure to use. If there are two competing groups, they’ll produce a tool with two separate sections which work well individually but don’t work well together (Windows and Office, anyone?). If things are entirely dysfunctional, then nothing’s going to work properly at all.
In order to get your technology right, you have to get people doing the right things. That’s where process comes in, and you work out what the right process is by aligning it with strategy. Herein lies the next problem:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
- Peter Drucker
You might have the perfect technology, and have designed a flawless, strategically brilliant process, but without the organisational culture to carry it off, you still won’t get anywhere.
You have to put people first. However, flashy, the technological tools you implement have to be in service of what people are trying to do. What people are trying to do is always going to be in service to the organisation’s culture, because that’s the way humans work. If your technology isn’t a good cultural fit, it’s never going to get used.
It’s always worth remembering that technology, much like money itself, is more of a force multiplier than it is an inherent good. It lets you do more of whatever it is you were doing before, only quicker and bigger. If you’re doing something good, then it’ll help you do more good. If you’re doing something wrong, however, all it’ll do is make for a bigger bang and a deeper crater. Ultimately it’s the culture of the organisation that guides whether what it does is right or wrong.
Is there any hope for our imaginary organisation at the beginning of the article? Not if they carry on the way they are going. Fortunately for them, there are more ways of understanding culture and behaviour than ever before. We’ll explore some of those in future posts.
