The future of the Middle Manager: sense making in a social media age

Posted on October 23, 2011 by lawrence serewicz
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There is a debate over the future of middle managers. (See for example Lynda Gratton’s article) http://hbr.org/2011/01/column-the-end-of-the-middle-manager/ar/1 at its heart, the question is whether middle manager still have a role. If their tasks are changed or replaced by technology, are they still needed?  The case against middle managers is that technological changes their role to the point where they are not needed (Drucker The coming of the new organisation (http://hbr.org/1988/01/the-coming-of-the-new-organization/ar/pr )  I argue, however, that this approach to middle managers misunderstands their role in the changing future of work.  Although technology, the web, social media, micro blogging sites, may change their tasks, their role is enhanced by the new technology.  To be sure, there is less need for numbers, but their role remains essential.

The future of the middle manager is also the future of work. (See the work led by Gratton http://bsr.london.edu/lbs-article/581/index.html)  As work changes, because of technology and societal changes, management will change. We are moving away from the traditional view of the middle manager as the general manager. (See Uyterhoevan’s now out-dated classic), Work now requires the middle manager to be a “networked sense maker”. To be fair to Uyterhoevan he did recognise this idea. His article addressed the middle manager distinct role in working to translating strategy into practice. He did not go so far as Balogun and Johnson to develop how this role relies upon sense making. The middle manager role will stay in any organisation because someone will have to translate the senior management’s visions and priorities and turns them into practical activities, plans, and goals.  Here is how Balogun and Johnson describe the issue when considering change initiatives in an organisation.

As they seek to put the change plans of their seniors into action, their everyday experiences of the actions and behaviours of others, and the stories, gossip, jokes, conversations and discussions they share with their peers about these experiences, shape their interpretations of what they should be doing. Change interventions and plans are translated into action through the medium of these inter-recipient processes, turning top-down intended change into an emergent and unpredictable process. (p.2)

In the past, the middle manager would have been defined by their place in the hierarchy, now; instead, their position is more fluid because it depends on that sense-making role.  In large organisations, there will be a tension between the formal and the informal roles. Formally, someone may be a middle manager because the organisational structure shows them to be one. However, in the informal structure, where social media allows informal (and formal) networks to emerge a relatively junior officer, may be the “middle manager” because they are adept at translating the vision.  occupies that nodal role by “making sense” of the vision and translating it, has the de facto middle manager role.

Yammer is a platform for this type of approach.  Cap Gemini use it in this way as Senior Managers analyse the traffic on it to see how their messages are being received.  As a micro blogging platform, Yammer offers what Drucker described as the “information organisation”.  However, the information organisation is not without its risks. The risk is from the resistance of the formal hierarchy to the opportunity created by micro blogs. To cut or remove that resistance, senior managers have support and use the platform.  They can use it to clarify their message and send the outlines of their programmes.  By doing this, they will not replace middle managers, but better equip them to translate the vision into practical frontline work goals. Such an approach can support the formal hierarchy and still encourage the micro-blogs to give information to senior managers. For a success story, see Capgemini (http://www.managementexchange.com/story/microblogging-capgemini)

Where organisations will get this horribly wrong is where senior managers simply give their vision through the formal structure.  What this does is tell the organisation that the informal networks are not important even though most staff use them.  Moreover, it privileges those who are exploiting the informal network for their own ends.  If the rest of the organisation does not understand the vision and how they work in it, they depend on a fractured informal network controlled by information gatekeepers.  In turn, the senior managers become frustrated because they do not understand why their change initiatives are not working the way they intended.  At the same time, the message is fractured to the frontline staff.   Where middle managers are good at redistributing the message, they will have a better working relationship.  By contrast, units that do not have access to that information remain vulnerable to the unintended consequences.

Instead of harnessing the informal network, senior managers who rely only upon the formal hierarchy force units to rely upon a fractured informal network.  Within a fractured informal network, the quality and quantity of information is reduced.  The frontline staff cannot rely upon their middle managers to “make sense” of what the organisation is doing and why. Moreover, the excluded will turn increasingly to the informal structure further exacerbating the unintended consequences as set out by Balogun and Johnson.

Even though Drucker thought that the new organisation would cut the role of the middle management role, they continue to have a role. http://hbr.org/1988/01/the-coming-of-the-new-organization/ar/1 He was right about how information is changing structures and how decisions are made. However, what he did not consider fully is how important the human element remains in management.   An update on Drucker’s view of the new organisation can be seen in Shah’s article.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2011/01/18/will-enterprise2-0-leaders-replace-middle-managers-entirely/  Shah compared the different roles of a manager with and without the support of social media technology.  He found that there is still much that remains available to managers in their role.

Shah’s article also reminds us that we have to look beyond the theoretical discussions and communication issues relate to the practical issue of middle management.  A recent study, by the management firm Knox D’Arcy  http://www.knoxdarcy.com/market-analysis showed that “active management” is still in high demand. Too often, they argue, that time is wasted and managers rely upon “passive management” instead of setting targets and follow up with their staff. http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1023280/Bad-managers-blame-local-government-inefficiency/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

The report was focused on local government, but it had a message for managers in general.  Despite Drucker’s argument against middle managers, technology can only substitute for them up to a point. There remains a direct and immediate need for active management.

“An active management style is clearly a more difficult way to manage because it requires the clear establishment of performance expectations and boundaries, the confrontation of underperformance, the denunciation and elimination of unproductive activity and the objective reporting of performance and productivity to drive decision making.” P.6

Even with a workflow system or electronic monitoring, the senior management is not going to be able to take the time to manage directly their frontline staff in a large organisation.  In smaller organisation, the units and teams may be organised by expertise and driven by their own agreed incentives.  However, most work is not structured that way. Therefore, there is still the need for the manager to maintain performance and translate vision into work programmes and goals. However, the issue may be in how those managers are trained and whether they have the skills.   As the D’Arcy report argues, managers are not being trained appropriately in the core skills they need to deliver active management. As a result, they do not get the best from their teams.  In that situation, it is understandable if senior manager seek to automate the workflow or outsource at lower labour costs. However, that only displaces the problem.

In the end, the role of the middle manager is here to stay even in the social media age. There are two related reasons for this.  First, there is a need for middle managers to translate and send the senior management messages to their units and teams.  By doing this, they can help make sure the work is organised appropriately.  At the same time, active management requires middle managers to work closely with their teams and adjust their work programmes to improve performance and deliver against the agreed goals and targets.

In that sense, middle managers will not disappear and no amount of technology is going to replace that role.

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The Tyranny of Time: the other side of open data

Posted on October 7, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

I came across the following reference to time within the retail sector and it made me consider how local government, or any business, thinks about time.

An old saying in the retail industry is that: ‘If information is available monthly, then decisions taken will take 6 months to have an effect. If it is available weekly, then decisions take a month to influence outcomes; if daily, it takes a week; and if hourly, the decisions can have an impact the next day’ (p.13)

(Source : Valuing Information as an Asset http://www.sas.com/reg/gen/uk/valuing-information )

How often do councils, and other organisations, collect data? In many organisations, there are quarterly returns, but is that enough for today’s services? In some cases, councils collect real-time data, but are their reporting systems ready for it? For example, a scrutiny or a cabinet committee meetings may be once a month, but is that enough to have a strategic view of what is happening within an organisation?

At one level, the timeframe for the Members is different because their work is strategic, they are trying to shape the organisation’s future and where it will be over the long term and not determining if the recent bin collection achieved 99% or 98% effectiveness. Even if we discount the member’s need to have real time data (at least a strategic level) and focus on the officer’s role, we still see the tyranny to time.

How often do officers see, use, or for that matter, analyse, real-time data? Do our performance management systems display a disconnect between the timescale within which they are collected and reported? We may have bin collection rates measured every day, but if our performance reporting within the organisation is quarterly, how well does that serve the organisation? At the same time, is that performance information available to the services, such as customer service desks?

In the bin example, if the real-time performance is being reported to the customer service desk, they can see that the bin collection rate on a snowy day (for example) is lagging in some areas, but is still robust in other areas. Thus, a call from an area with good collection (say 99%) is going to be a different issue than a missed bin in an area with an 80% collection rate because of the snow conditions. Yet, how many performance management systems or performance information systems are designed to capture and analyse real time data. Even weekly data, can be considered real time data depending on the service, so it raises the point at the start. If the information is only available quarterly, what is the impact rate? If you collect each quarter, is the final impact seen yearly or in two years? If that is the timescale, is it going to be effective?

What does this have to do with open data? If data is being collected and made available to the public, are they getting real time data or is there an institutional lag effect on the data? One of the main themes within the UK  government’s open data collection consultation (http://data.gov.uk/opendataconsultation) as well as its overall transparency agenda is to open service performance information to the public.

The service performance information will inform their choice about services but also to hold it to account. Yet, if there is a lag effect, between when service information is collected and published can the public hold a local authority to account effectively? How much and when the information is released can have a large influence on whether an organisation is accountable. If it only has to report once a year, how much accountability can be achieved? If a change in performance is required, how will it be demonstrated in such a long reporting cycle?

If, however, the real time data is released, will that have a destabilizing effect on the political process? If the political process is relying on quarterly performance reporting and the public are getting the information in real time, how will members be able to respond? Moreover, if members, as residents, are consuming the information in real time as well what is the role of a quarterly performance reporting system?  To be sure there will be different reports for different issues, but the underlying question is how to make  open data respond to real time demand.  Do I need to know the car park was full last week if I am trying to get parked now?

The issue of time is also about how and where information is released. If an organisation releases its performance statistics in a paper report, and not as a spreadsheet, can external scrutiny be achieved?  In that sense, the format for publication will show the timescales. Such reporting has an immediate and direct effect on the ability of the public, and members, to hold the organisation to account.

At the same time, there is the question of whether real time reporting fits your strategy. If one company is working on a the day to day reporting and another is taking a ten year strategy to grow they will have different understandings of time.  Moreover, their reporting mechanisms will be different.  Yet, can the 10 year plan work without taking care of the day to day? In that sense, can anyone escape the tyranny of time?  The more your competitors harness, the more you will need to adapt or adopt.

From an accountability perspective, the issue may be simply finding a way to reconcile that with monthly or quarterly performance reporting to the real time data.

What effect this has on the public sector? Only time will tell.

 

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Owning the problem: using complaints as an improvement tool

Posted on September 29, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

In books on management, there is often a tendency to look at the large or strategic issues that a company faces. The company has to have vision and a strategy for achieving the vision. Without a strategy or a vision, it will not survive for long. What is also needed, but often overlooked, is the need to deliver the daily work of the organisation. In particular, the need to solve the problems, especially complaints, that emerge.  Yet, this is where many firms often fail.

Complaints, in particular, present a particular challenge because there is no upside to workers to take responsibility.  Yet, that is exactly what needs to be done for a culture of customer service to emerge and thrive: you have to have workers willing to “own” the problem.  An example, of where that can go wrong can be seen in the Parliamentary and Health Service report.  Ann Abram’s report called A Breach of Confidence: http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/6411 /PHSO-0108-HC-709-report-final-web-11012011.pdf

In this situation, the three organisations refused to own the problem.  Instead, they chose to blame someone else, even though they contributed to the issue.  The issue was not the complaint, but rather their response to it.  Instead of seeing this as an opportunity, a problem recognised that they did not know existed, they sought to avoid it and downplay it. Moreover, there are strong incentives now, with the power of the Information Commissioner to levy fines for breaches of the Data Protection Act, to make sure that an organisation is sharing and managing its’ customers personal information correctly.

To overcome this bias to avoid complaints and over report compliments, an organisation needs to develop an ethos whereby complaints are seen as a chance to improve. http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-use-customer-concerns-and-complaints-to-you.html

The goal is not to blame someone for a failure; rather the goal is to improve the service so the next person does not face the same issue.  By doing improving services in response to complaints, an organisation can develop a learning culture. At the same time, the organisation has to show that people reporting or fixing complaints are not in the firing line.  By encouraging staff to own problems, and not seeking to find ways to avoid blame, the ethos of an organisation changes to one that is customer driven and results orientated.

In the example above, the organisations did not see the complaint as something that they needed to change or improve. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity to reassess their data sharing relationships and how they audit changes to their systems, the focus was on making sure they were not in the firing line.  If the problem had been owned at the beginning, it is unlikely that it would have reached the Ombudsman.

Perhaps the question to ask is not how many compliments someone has received, or even how many complaints. Rather the question managers should be asking is what improvements have you made from complaints and how have you learned from that complaint.  In that way, an organisation can become a learning organisation. Then, if a complaint is truly intractable, the organisation’s reputation for learning, for customer service, and owning problems becomes an asset when facing the Ombudsman.

Given the amount of time organisations spend building their reputation and managing it, one would imagine that they would want to have the reputation for owning problems, solving them, and delivering good customer service. http://www.webershandwick.com/resources/ws/flash/WS_HBR_Reputation_Warfare_Electronic.pdf

In these difficult economic times, that is a way to keep customers.

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Does Yammer and social media lead to improved FOIA response rates?

Posted on September 26, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

Does Yammer or any social media platform create better internal communications? If it does, then does that lead to better performance? Are companies that use social media platforms able to share critical upwards communication?  For public sector organisations, does internal transparency leads to better external transparency, such as in the time taken to respond to FOIA requests?

Many public and private organisations use Yammer and other social media platforms (wikis or blogs) to improve internal communications.  More information can be shared and this creates and increases trust.  The increased trust allows opportunities to be grasped and problems to be solved.  The internal transparency through this process extends to external transparency.  In this way, performance is improved by sharing information and solutions. If the theory holds up, then bad news or critical upwards communications can be shared more easily https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/bitstream/10059/190/1/LRPpaper1.pdf In that sense, social media allows leaders to explain their vision and hear the bad news that may contradict it or undermine it.

What is still unexplored is whether that happens in practice.  There is still not certainty that internal transparency, such as through Yammer or other social media platforms, leads to improved external transparency in the public sector. One would expect that organisations that use these platforms have better response times with FOIA requests.  However, what remains unresolved is whether the platform creates the culture or the culture creates the platform.  At the same time, FOIA response rates may be a product of culture and technology.  An organisation may be transparent before it uses the technology instead of using technology to make it transparent. (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/business/david-sacks-of-yammer-on-fostering-dissent-corner-office.html?pagewanted=all

The following report looks at the use of wikis by Government managers. http://www.businessofgovernment.org/report/using-wikis-government-guide-public-managers The report suggests that they improve performance. The question, though, does that improve internal transparency lead to better FOIA responses and better external transparency. At the same time, do they improve the reporting of critical upwards communication? In a sense, the leadership may be embracing the technology to improve performance without understanding that their own behaviour is as much responsible for the performance as it is the technology. However, the challenge is that the trust needed to embrace transparency requires more than technology. Transparency can improve performance but cultural challenges have to be overcome to make it work.  http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/my-new-favorite-color-transparent

The challenge may be to find leaders, as well as subordinates, who can live the culture http://www.pfdf.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=741  Leaders need to have a style of leadership that allows them to search out the raw information within the organisation that may be unsettling because it contradicts the “the company line”.  How many leaders can continually search out the contrary opinion? How many can hear the bad news, that reflects on their overall management, without succumbing to the wish to dismiss it by the good news they hear?  What may help them is that the social media ethos itself is one that encourages transparency and trust because the online world works best through such open sharing and collaborating. Yet, it is a different thing together to carry the ethos of external networks to an internal domain where decisions and actions have immediate and direct consequences.  To put it differently and directly, it is one thing to tweet anonymously about your views on the company strategy; it is another to sit in a meeting and say it directly to the CEO.

Yet, good leaders thrive on this type of information and Yammer and other social media platforms, such as wikis, are a good way to break down information silos and share this information. (http://usyd.academia.edu/PaulScifleet/Papers/874330/Tweet_Talking-Exploring_The_Nature_Of_Microblogging_at_Capgemini_Yammer)  However, this may only work in the private sector without the political concerns that are present in the public sector. In some cases, especially in the US system political appointees can act as gatekeepers for FOIA requests.  In this role, they may limit or stop access to the information they control. In other cases, there may be information hoarders who refuse to share or seek to limit anyone’s access to “their” information.  In the end, it may be that better internal communications leads to increased trust within an organisation and social media platforms improve the internal communications.  An interesting MA thesis on the topic is  http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd1139.pdf (Transparency in the Government Communication Process: the perspective of government communicators.  Jenille Fairbanks.)

In the UK, social media can be seen as a way to leverage a council’s limited resources. (http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/aio/17801438)  The question though is whether it improves performance.  In the case of FOIA requests, which seem to increase yearly, such platforms seem to be a way to leverage the collective wisdom or knowledge of an organisation. It is still to be seen whether they improve FOIA response times or improve trust within an organisation and between organisations and the public. Some UK authorities and organisations are using it http://www.lgcomms.org.uk/blog/knowledge?blog=yammer  such as Kent County Council and  Walsall Council. Brighton and Hove started with it back in 2009 (here is the link to a case study on it http://www.webyogi.co.uk/yammer-in-local-government-an-experiment-in-internal-social-media/

When employees are able to find and address problems or service shortfalls, it helps to build trust and transparency within an organisation. The social media platforms allow staff to report issues and it allows senior managers to communicate their goals and vision.  The idea is that social media platforms can cut the amount of information that is “lost in translation”. By refining the message based upon how staff are responding, there is less chance it is going to be implemented differently than it is understood. The problem of sense making by those who receive the change and how they, in turn, carry out it is well known. See the work by Balogun and Johnson. They explore how middle managers, as change recipients, make sense of change imperatives from the top and translate it into unintended outcomes. http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charlesw/s591/Bocconi-Duke/Papers/new_C12/From%20Intended%20strategies%20to%20unintended%20outcomes%20%20The%20impact%20of%20change%20recipient%20sensemaking.pdf

What is needed is evidence to show a clear link between social media platforms being used by organisations that have high FOIA response rates.  Once that link is established, the second stage is to look at the internal culture and consider whether it has a higher level of trust and transparency internally, which helps it achieve its external transparency. Finally, the third stage will be to decide whether the improved transparency and trust leads to improved performance.  In the end, it may not be so much technology as culture that leads to trust and transparency both internally and externally. If that is the case, then it returns to the leaders to set the tone and continually reinforcing the trust and transparency culture as they seek to improve the organisation.

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Do companies really know how to value their emails?

Posted on September 24, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

Do companies really know how to value their emails? Do they treat them like other assets or is it that because they cannot value them, they do not store them or manage them correctly?  I was struck by this question in reading Steve Bailey’s interesting paper on the failure of email management. http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/ He argues (to simplify his excellent argument) that records management field has failed to manage emails. In effect, records managers should just let workers keep all their emails if they want because trying to change the way they work will not succeed.  Therefore, the best thing to do is to work around them.

The desire to keep everything was linked to an interesting news story on the BBC about the self-storage craze:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14718478

My argument is that self-storage makes sense in ways that reveal why email management and records management do not work.  To put it simply, organisations do not place a value on their emails, records management, or the storage required to retain them. As a result, they do not manage them.

Consider the following in comparing self-storage craze and the desire to keep all our emails.  First, self-storage makes sense from a financial point of view. The sofa or the old LP record is a fixed cost. It is an asset. By contrast, the emails, as such, are not an asset in the same way.  For the most part, their value is fluid and relative to their context. In that sense their half-life is quite short.  Who really needs 50 emails from 5 years ago?  To what end?  Whatever they referred to is long completed or covered by other more permanent records.

Second, the self-storage “craze”, as such, makes cultural sense in an age of austerity.  My parents grew up in the US Great Depression so they have a different view to retaining items like “old sofas”.  The cultural argument is related to the economic argument, which is the third point.

Third, sofas and others assets retain value either as sunk cost or at least a replacement costs.  The sunk cost is the £200 spent 5 years ago for a sofa.  The replacement cost is the £1000 you would need to replace the sofa today. Therefore, if the item still works and is of use, then there is value to it.  If it were money, would people throw it away?

Fourth, if nothing else, the item has a barter or emotional value. A sofa can be handed down or donated. Does anyone donate or barter emails? How many people bequeath their emails?  At the same time, most people who inherit a job delete or archive the previous resident’s material. It is rare that the successor comes in and picks up the place in the same way.

Fifth, the item could be sold in a future state.  If there was a pure market, one that self-cleared, the sofa could be sold and one could be bought when needed. However, life (even in the days of eBay) is not that neat and clean.  After all no one buys disposable clothing or disposable plates for all of their needs. Data seems to be backwards looking or a residual of a previous transaction.  In many ways, emails are, for lack of a better word, the shadow of a transaction and not the transaction itself.

By contrast, information does not have that same value. However, there are two different ways to look at information value. One is to look at from a compliance view, I need this email because it is a record and without it, we face a Data Protection Act issue or an E-Discovery issue.  Second, they can contain a business opportunity, which will offer value. There are ideas or something of value within them and that is why they need to be retained.  However, in comparison to sofas and records, the emails are less likely to hold value. However, that does raise a question about how we measure the value of the information we hold.

Perhaps we need a metric to measure the value of the information within the emails (and not worrying about them as emails as such) and thereby find a way to decide our approach to them.  If we can do that, then we can see the value in them and have a definite reason to keep them.

In the end, the organisation can keep everything, without challenging the employees to change the way they work, or it can put a value on the email’s content and manage them in line with how it manages other assets.  My guess is that organisations will opt for the latter and not the former.

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Does social media lead to better performance or better customer service? Is it shaping those cultures or revealing them?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

Does the use of social media inside an organisation or externally create better performance or better customer service? The argument is that social media improves a company’s financial position by improving its reputation through increased external customer service and improved employee engagement inside the organisation. However, the underlying question is whether this works in practice.

The idea behind this argument is that customers receive better service from organisations that are better connected with them.

There is a strong assumption that organisations, and workers, who are under more public scrutiny, are better behaved in that they are more attuned to a larger audience beyond the customer in front of them.  However, this depends on the organisation’s culture as much as it does upon the customer.  Will all customers report bad customer service? Are organisations attuned to responding to complaints about bad customer service?  There are many stories of people broadcasting their complaints on the web, but after the novelty factor, how effective is that in the long-term. If you are the 15th person blogging about bad customer service from Acme Corp. or Any corp, does that have the same impact as the first time?  Soon, we reach a “so what” inflection point. ”Yep, you have had bad customer service so why do you want me to get excited about it?”

At the same time, the argument is that social media within an organisation may foster improved employee engagement.  The idea is that employees connected though social media know what is happening within the organisation and are more engaged and connected to each other and by inference to the customer.  The underlying idea here is that internal social media leads to increased employee engagement and this leads to better outcomes for the organisation and the customer.  See for example, the use of Yammer (a micro blogging platform) at Capgemini http://www.managementexchange.com/story/microblogging-capgemini

If the results are there internally, does that lead to better outcomes for the customer or does it privilege some customers over others? In terms of customer service, is there a danger that the social media can privilege the connected over the unconnected? For example, some may respond quickly e email from a cabinet minister, so they get preferential treatment from an organisation in a way that the email or letter from a resident might not. In that sense, social media may reveal rather than shape an organisation’s culture.

The challenge, then, is for the leadership to overcome these implicit, or explicit, biases within the culture and set the tone within the organisation regarding customer service and performance.  If social media, through micro blogging can do that, though, are leaders who have succeeded without those tools going to be sensitive to and ready to engage with the promise and potential of social media?  Will they be able to see or accept that social media will improve performance and customer service?

There is a challenge for leaders to understand whether the social media is a change in degree or kind and whether they can accept the indeterminacy of social media in that its effects (intended or otherwise) are beyond their immediate control.

Yammer and other social media offer the promise that they will improve critical upward communication. Critical upwards communication is the information about problems that threaten an organisation that are known to the frontline workers, but not known by the top managers.  CUC is information the frontline want to tell the top but are uncertain or potentially fearful of telling their managers because it contravenes or contradicts the image or impression that senior managers have of the service or the team.  The idea is that Yammer and internal social media will allow managers to receive more CUC so that they can find the problems, know the issues that are emerging, and respond quickly and openly to them.  For more on CUC, see Denis Tourish’s excellent article:

https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/bitstream/10059/190/1/LRPpaper1.pdf

I would be interested to know if organisations that have been using Yammer to improve critical upwards communication.  Do top managers get better information and are they more attuned to emerging problems in businesses that use yammer and other social media? Moreover, do these organisations get improved results and deliver better customer service both internally and externally?

What may be occurring is that companies that already have a habit or tradition of nurturing CUC use Yammer and other social media to enhance and leverage existing systems.  If social media does not so much change culture as reveal it, then the first question is to return to the culture to determine whether it is ready for social media. The challenge for leaders then is to use social media to shape their culture before the inability to use social media unermines their ability to compete for customers both internally and externally.

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Can Councils make money from e-learning?

Posted on September 9, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

I recently used Adobe Captivate for the first time to make a training module on Data Protection. What struck me about the experience was the following.

First, it was relatively easy to rewrite a policy into a series of PowerPoint slides (which is good way to convert to Captivate) to an interactive module.

Second, any module will need to be fine-tuned to make it look and feel professional. Working with a good digital editor, or a lot of extra time, would polish it into something marketable. There are options to add videos as well as voice-overs within the slides. The options are quite extensive if the subject lends itself to using multimedia or voice-overs.

Third, any module is only as good as it is used. Therefore, extensive user testing will be required to refined its fit.

Fourth, the modules can be interspersed with quiz slides to test learning and enhance understanding. All of these are only the technical requirements, what made it interested was the opportunity it may afford to local government.

What makes this interesting is how easy it was to turn an existing policy into a training module. Given the cost of procuring external training or training modules, something like Captivate (there are other packages available) allows a Council or an organisation to leverage its own internal knowledge base into training and awareness modules. Yet, this is only one part of the potential from e-learning created by the social media opportunities. The wider opportunity is selling and marketing that training to other organisations. For example, a large council could create basic training or awareness modules on all sorts of subjects for its parish councils in the area. They could be sold for a nominal price £15 or licensed for use. To be sure, the goal is not to make money but to offer a lower priced alternative to training by external providers. Aside from the economic question, there is a further wider question to consider.

How far will e-learning take us in developing knowledge workers within local government and the public sector? If 73% of BT staff prefer to learn from their colleagues, it suggests that there is an untapped market within organisations for training and awareness e-learning generated by staff.

The issue is one that the private sector examines so that they can leverage their workforce and reduce costs of replacing staff because it is less expensive to retrain that it is to recruit. For example, BT developed a programme for sharing learning content.

Click to access Towards_Maturity_BT__Atlantic_Link_-_Accessibility_case_study_Final_Nov_2008.pdf

At the same time, there is an opportunity to engage staff and to develop leaders based upon such work.  For example, staff could be recognised for their expertise on a subject.  Also, it would be a way for leaders to be developed as social networking and use of social media becomes an important leadership trait for future leaders within an organisation.  One successful module is not going to make someone the next Chief Executive, but it may help find staff with an initiative or enthusiasm to develop and expand their skill set within the organisation.

The question though is whether certain industries benefit more from e-learning or lend themselves to it. At the same time, does e-learning require a certain type of learner? To be sure, no one would say one size fits all, yet e-learning and social media are in some ways methods that lend themselves to a different type of worker or at least a different approach to work. The knowledge worker, a term often overused or inappropriately applied (http://www.slideshare.net/trib/knowledge-worker-20), suggests a type of worker that would select this approach. If this is the underlying trend (e-learning and knowledge workers) and public service is become a knowledge intensive business (as it takes on a more regulatory and commissioning role) then what does this mean for employee learning?

The dare2share work at BT suggests that employees benefit from this type of approach to learning and it provides benefits for the company. http://www.towardsmaturity.org/elements/uploads/BT_-_next_generation_learning_at_work_case_study__Final_20_march_09.pdf

A couple of challenges, though, remain as the learning needs to be deepened and developed if it is to help to educate an employee. For BT, this may not be a problem, but for smaller local authorities, the number of staff limits the pool of expertise. Second, the knowledge developed internally will reach a point of diminishing returns. Even teachers have to learn from someone else. Thus, the challenge is to find new teachers or go wider than the organisation for the learning. In that sense, there is a need to find a way to overcome the push-pull dilemma. How to push knowledge to those who are not yet demanding it and creating knowledge for those pulling it. There has to be a dynamic learning system that can cater to more than one approach and one type of learner.

The tipping point, or the unresolved transition point is when awareness tips over to become learning and development. In a sense, when does information become knowledge? There are no easy or immediate answers to this question, but it does suggest that the e-learning is now reaching a point of a critical mass because the tools and techniques are scalable and affordable.

I would be interested in your views and experience with this type of e-learning and whether you think it will develop further in your organisation.

(Large sections of this post were inspired by work done by Dave Briggs (see in particular http://davepress.net/2011/05/17/knowledge-worker-2-0/ and http://davepress.net/2011/07/10/social-knowledge-and-learning-at-bt/

Posted in elearning, information management, knowledge worker, local government, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Councils make money from e-learning?

Why don’t organisations manage their information in the same way they manage their money?

Posted on September 1, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

In the expanding social media age, I wonder how many organisations spend as much time managing their money as they do their information and knowledge.  By that I mean, there are regular reports on the financial position. Managers hold regular budget meetings with the accountants. The accountants spend time reviewing the accounts and the balance sheet.  Managers meet regular to discuss budgets and how they will be managed.

By contrast, how often do managers senior or junior, meet to discuss the information (or knowledge) created and held within their teams?  In the emerging social media/knowledge management world, information, which becomes knowledge, is incredibly valuable. Yet, we do not spend much time on it. In many ways, the information is the money.

Despite that view, most managers appear to look at information through the perspective of regulatory compliance. The goal in that framework is to the information becoming a problem (a breach or a leak). Some managers take a different approach by looking for the opportunities the information provides. They look within the information their organisation holds or creates. They seek out external information that can add value to the internal information.

The theoretical points can be seen in how organisations manage their emails. When an organisation meets its legal requirements, does it consider how that compliance affects the value of its information?  Emails are a source of vital business records but they are seen as a compliance issue and not a management issue. In most cases, staff are not very good at managing their emails.  In particular, records managers face a constant challenge with maintaining an email system that complies with records management principles.

Chris Prom described the issue from a theoretical perspective when summarising an argument presented by Steve Bailey.  Steve presented his paper at the Digital Preservation Coalition’s event on Preserving Email: Directions and Perspectives. http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/32-preserving-email-directions-and-perspectives He suggested that a records management approach to emails had been a wasted effort http://bit.ly/n9Xv6h.  The argument was a new approach was needed that reflected how employees worked and not trying to get the employees to fit into a records management system.

Perhaps the reason for that failure is that managers are not discussing email management with their staff in the same way that they discuss the importance of sound financial management. Do managers regularly discuss the records created and retained in emails? From a regulatory framework, especially in the UK, poor email management can lead to large fines under the Data Protection Act.  In the UK, the largest Data Protection fine so far (£120,000 fine to Surrey County Council) related to breaches involving emails. At the same time, the courts have placed a greater emphasis on e-discover covering emails. The mismanagement of emails and the information they contain can have serious financial and legal consequences.

Despite these risk and these penalties, organisations do not appear to see the value in the information.  The opportunity within information is what creates it value.  The value of information is what requires it to be managed like money. The information and knowledge being generated by staff on a regular basis are what will make organisations value. The extent to which organisations can capture that knowledge and retain that information, they will be able to retain value.  More importantly, they will need to find ways to leverage the information they already have to extract greater value from it.  However, few managers, it would appear, actively review, discuss, or analyse the information and knowledge they hold for that value.

In one sense, this is to be expected because knowledge and information are less tangible than the money. In a physical sense, a corporation’s money is as intangible to senior managers as is the information.  Few, if any, Chief Financial Officers ever see or touch the money that they allocated. In that sense, the tangibility and fungibility of money and information are the same. Yet, there is an important difference.

The opportunity held within money is constantly assessed, quantified, analysed, and expressed.  By contrast, the information and knowledge coursing through an organisation rarely gets the same value analysis.  One may talk about petabytes of information, or databases, or even the proposals and patents. How many are looking at the opportunity value of the information and knowledge within a team or a service?  The problem may be the need to find an appropriate metric to measure the value of information or quantify a good idea.  Yet, one could also suggest that such a metric already exists as organisations decide to back some projects and not others.  However, does that still leave the information and the knowledge contained within those projects under exploited? In doing so, are we managing the outcome of the information rather than the information itself?

In the end, the question remains: why don’t we manage our information and knowledge to the same degree we manage our money?

Posted in data protection act, email, information management, innovation, knowledge worker, relative success, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why don’t organisations manage their information in the same way they manage their money?

Three reasons why Apple will disappear by 2020: What Machiavelli tells us about managing Apple’s future.

Posted on August 29, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

Apple is changing with Steven Jobs stepping down from his current CEO role to become Chairman of the Board.  In doing so, he presents Apple with a challenge and one that all companies have to face.  How do you replace the company’s founder and still maintain the same or similar success?  To address this eternal management question, I think that we can draw some lessons from Niccolo Machiavelli.  He wrote at length in his two classic books the Prince and the Discourses about the founding, reforming, and fall of regimes. In his teachings, we can find lessons for Apple as it struggles with its future.

After Jobs, Apple will fail for three main reasons and they all have to do with central problems of management.

  1. Steven Jobs as Chairman of the Board leaves no room for a successor. What would or can a successor do? Where do they begin and how do they disagree with the vision that is Apple if that is what is required to save Apple?  In a religion or a philosophy, one simply reinterprets the visionary’s teachings for the new age. In business, however, this is a recipe for disaster as new competitors, but more importantly, new markets and ideas emerge. As Machiavelli wrote in the Discourses (I, 9) a state will not endure for long if it relies on one individual but requires many to sustain it. Yet, are the many in place to sustain what Jobs has created and can they stay focused on the Apple vision without Jobs at the helm? The question is whether Jobs has sufficiently prepared the organisation to transition away from his leadership. Has he built a company that can live without him without stifling the change that needs to happen?
  2. The second problem is that of a successor who has to lead the company and change its ways even as it sustains those or similar ways. Here is one of the eternal challenges for any new manager or CEO.  How do you retain the loyalty of the old guard while rewarding the new guard who follows your thinking and the way you want the company to go?  Many will be around but are they there to sustain it in your way or in the way they believe it should be done? The many that are left to maintain must share the same vision for what is to follow. Yet, this raises the challenge of succession for those who have followed Jobs. It is one thing to subsume your ego when following someone like Steven Jobs but something quite different to do the same for his successor.
  3. The third challenge is harnessing future changes in current activities. At the heart of Apple is an idea and ideas are difficult to sustain. The idea may remain eternal, but how it is applied changes.  In this we see, as Machiavelli discussed in Chapter 25 of the Prince, that Apple’s advantage is precarious.  As it attempts to cement its position within media and manufacturing through its lifestyle devices, it faces an eternal problem.  What gives it advantage today will create the fixed cost of its future.  In other words, it has to make a bet about its future today. As such, it cannot retain its flexibility for innovation and its ability to adapt and cater to the popular cultural market. As that market matures, as all markets do, can its model sustain itself?

So what will have to happen? To survive, Apple has to become something else. Therein lies *the* management challenge:  how do you reposition a successful company to shift from what was successful to what needs to be successful. The answer, though, is not more Apple because that would be trying to reinterpret the visionary’s teachings. The company has to change and find a new path.  The new path may be enough for today; will it be enough for the future?

How does Apple change from what it is to what it needs to be? Is the Apple model simply unsustainable in the long-term because it relies upon Jobs? If so, what is the next step? Going from a founder to a maintainer can happen in a political regime where stability is desired. In a business environment, however, stability can mean the competition catches up.

So what does Apple need to do? Someone is needed who can reform Apple and change it to what it needs to become. It needs to agree internally that it has to change. In other words, it has to understand what Apple is now and what Apple needs to become.  If someone arrives who wants to do more of the same, Apple’s demise will be faster. Instead, it has to decide where its future will be decided. As the Steven Jobs era is over, he must understand, in his new role, that the only way to save that legacy (and thereby bring the company forward) is to treat the company as “the next big thing” and allow Apple to become something different from what it is today.

Update:  The passing of Steven Jobs means that Apple’s problems become more explicit.  The difference, though, is that with his passing there is no turning back from their course.  In that sense, Apple is now “free” to chart its path without having to reconcile its path to Jobs’ view from the sidelines.  As with the founding father of any state, their passing shifts the emphasis from the founding to the maintaining and the defending of the vision.  How his successors do that will be the “next big thing” for Apple.

Posted in change, creative destruction, innovation, path dependency, relative success, renewal | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Do we need change mangement because organisations cannot learn?

Posted on August 27, 2011 by lawrence serewicz

I have been reflecting on the relationship between learning and change and improvement for organisations. I know that an organisation can be a learning organisation, but does it learn?
An organisation may have tools to learn and it may have within it various teams that are learning, but does the organisation learn? The teams can do things differently but ar they learning?  In that sense, one can do things differently without changing.

If we learn something, we are changed by it. An organisation may improve without changing. For example, if we learn a new skill, or a new game, or just a new song, we are changed by it. Some of the lessons we learn change us more than others, but all change us. If that is the case, then should we be rethinking our approach to change management?
Are we in danger of focusing on the idea of “change management” without thinking through what we mean by change and what change means for the individual and the organisation? If change management means a structured approach to shifting the organization from its current state to a desired future state, then what do we need to do. We need an organizational process that empowers employees to accept and embrace changes in their business environment. If learning creates change, not all change creates learning. Dying changes us but we do not learn from it

Can we empower employees in this way if the organisation is not empowered or structured in this way? By that I mean the emerging work approach is for knowledge workers to push their own learning requirements and pull the required information from the areas around them.  The role of the organisation ,in this approach, is to provide the context and support for them to do their work.  Yet, most organisations are not structured in this way and want the knowledge worker, or any work, to fit within the pre-determined framework.  Thus, we may have learning at the micro level, the knowledge worker and their team, but no learning at the macro or organisational level.
If learning leads to change can what individuals learn make the organisation learn? In many ways, it may be that an organisation has to unlearn before it or we can learn. For example, an organisation has to recognise that what it is doing is no longer going to deliver the same result as before.   In this way, are organisation ready to refine how they work and use teams and knowledge workers.
The above presupposes that learning or changing is going to take an organisation from one state, the pre-learning stage, to a post learning state, the learned stage. If the transition is clear, then we can see its effect. What happens, though, if our change is caught up in the environmental change around us? By that I mean, the context in which change is occurring is also changing so that our learning, or change, does not move us forward because it is only enough to keep up. You only know you are speeding when you pass someone or you only know you are going too slowly when you are passed. If all the other cars are going exactly the same speed, relative to you, then you will not notice the change.

If this holds true for organisations, do we need to keep learning at the micro, or individual level, so that the people within the organisation can change?  Will that micro level change enable the organisation to change?
Is the underlying reality one that we cannot get an organisation to change and it is the context and the people within it that change? I wonder if the organisation, as organisation, does not change because it cannot learn. It may be that some organisations are not designed to learn and their purpose is not served by learning as such, but rather by honing their pursuit of their purpose. Perhaps what is happening is that instead of learning an organisation only refines its purposes in the same way that we learn a new skill but then we train it and deepen it. If we are seeking to train an organisation, rather than have it learn, then this will have a specific impact for change management. The goal will not be to learn, as such, to change rather it is to train. The difference is that training is only refining while learning is doing things differently for different reasons. For example, if an organisation takes on a service to become something different, it is changing. If it only refining and deepening what it has, then it is only training.
In that realm, change management could be counterproductive if it confuses the change needed to learn, become something different, with the change needed to refine the existing purpose and improve within that framework rather than transcend the framework.

In the end, do we need change management precisely because organisations cannot learn?

Posted in change managment, knowledge worker, path dependency, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment