Image above is from my MWT notes ~2005. Finally getting to build it out as a proposition.
“Here is a great story from the Netherlands. As in most cities, the consequences of increasing traffic were a major problem in the city of Drachten. Traffic jams and accidents in the town centre were steadily increasing, as did the doses of the standard medicine for this modern disease; more traffic lights and more signs to regulate and control drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. The same medicine as any other growing city would chose to combat its traffic problems. However, traffic authorities in Drachten found that increasing doses did not help. In 2003 the city decided to challenge accepted truth. A bold decision was made to remove all traffic lights and signs in the town centre, based on a belief that people pay more attention to their surroundings when they cannot rely on strict traffic rules.
Results were impressive. On the busiest intersections crossing times fell significantly, and accidents were reduced to almost zero.”
– From http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/end-performance-management-we-know-it
I’ve had to delve into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – to about 2005/6 it looks like to find an old article I wrote on “Organisational Usability”. I thought this was going to be big at the time. In fact I think it is starting to be big:
See here for original article: http://web.archive.org/web/20060507201901/http://www.managewithoutthem.com/show_article.asp?statement_id=114
…and the MWT Archive here: http://www.managewithoutthem.com/Archive-Feb-2007/MWT%20Complete%20Archive%20Feb%202007.pdf
Organisational Usability I
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In the hyper-capitalism of the Internet your web site’s usability can make or break it. A bunch of competitor web sites are only a click away; so if your site is too hard to use, ‘click away’ your visitors will. If the effectiveness of your web site depends on its usability, why not use that model for your entire company?
One of the Core Concepts of ManageWithoutThem is Organisational Usability. Organisational Usability is a broad term, created specifically for the ManageWithoutThem model. We will be revisiting Organisational Usability in future articles.
Organisational Usability uses the analogy of an Internet web site for your entire organisation. It is the advent of the Internet (and other personal communication technologies) that has made apparent the need for organisational redesign – so the analogy is a good fit.
Your organisation exists as a resource to be used by your customers and your employees. That is not to say that your organisation should be left to the whim of your employees and customers. What we mean is that as your employees are serving customers or creating new value through projects, they are leveraging the resources of your company. In this sense, your customers and employees are ‘using’ your organisation.
The effectiveness and efficiency in which the resources of the organisation can be leveraged is the Organisational Usability of the organisation.
And now some examples of the Web Site analogy in action…
Link to Homepage
One of the first lessons you learn in any web site usability course is that each page should have a link to the home page. This is because users of your web site might not enter the site from your homepage. Users need a way of exploring other pages of your site and other information or services you might offer.
As you gain experience with web site development you start to realise that the ‘link to homepage’ approach is an inadequate solution to the problem of mid-site entry into a web site. In Organisational Usability this is the equivalent of having to call the CEO to get something done!
Links to Related Services
Your organisational will have high Organisational Usability if it has a more sophisticated strategy than ‘ask the CEO’ whenever somebody finds itself lost within it.
Departments, particularly shared service providers, should be aware of any services that are related to their offerings. This will include relationships up and down the value chain, as well as peer relationships. This will also include relationships outside your company. Your IT department should know about the IT industry. Your Accounting department should know about the Accounting industry. Your Procurement department should know about the Procurement industry. (etc)
Pre-emptive Processes
When somebody visits your web site you have no idea how much of their purchase they have already completed. The web site user might need background information on how to start looking for products in your industry. Alternatively, the web site user might already have a part number and their credit card ready.
The importance of this to Organisational Usability is that the customers and employees of your organisation may wish to enter your processes from a point other than the beginning.
Equally as important, your employees and customers will be of varying levels of sophistication. Some may want you to manage things for them; but others (probably the best ones) will want to manage things themselves.
Still more sophisticated, might be those that want to ‘outsource’ the activity you provide for them – with very high expectations of service and quality. It is also likely that users have entered your site through a Portal of some kind.
For these reasons your customers (or employees from other departments) may not always want your Project Management services. Your customers may want to define their relationship with your process themselves.
Process in context
Your web site might have the most easy-to-use ordering system ever created, but it is not very helpful if your customers can’t get to it from the product they wish to buy. For this reason, the practice of placing ‘Buy Me’ and ‘Go to Checkout’ buttons beside each item is well established.
As far as Organisational Usability is concerned it should be understood that the context of day-to-day business will never be your companies business management system (which lists all of your organisation’s processes) – and you don’t want it to be.
If you want employees and customers to use particular processes you should think very carefully aboutwhen they will need to use those processes. Process owners should ask themselves: What would an employee be doing at the time that they should use my process? Then, every effort should be made to make the process visible from that context.
Frames
For those that don’t know, ‘frames’ (or ‘framesets’) is the term used when building web sites to describe a page made up of multiple sub pages viewed together. Frames are often seen as poor web site design because you don’t know if you are viewing a page as a stand-along page or if you are viewing the page in the context of the rest of the frameset.
In terms of Organisational Usability frames represent the other things that your employee or customer knows when they use your processes. The fact is they may know more or less than you expect.
Markets: Employees and Customers Converge
There is constant reference to Employees and Customers within this article. The traditional view of organisations requires you to view these as fundamentally different groups. Once you start viewing your organisation from the perspective of it’s Organisational Usability your will see these two groups converge.
After all if your company’s web site really does provide useful information about your organisation your employees will also visit it regularly.
For reference this is the Digital Transformation blog at SMS:
http://www.smsmt.com/Social/Blog/Digital-Transformation-Goes-Mainstream
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION GOES MAINSTREAM
A familiar anti-pattern to anybody who knows anything about security is “security by obscurity”. The idea of security by obscurity is that you can rely on withholding details of how a security protocol operates to increase the security of the protocol.
The simplest example might be if you store passwords “encrypted” but you don’t tell anybody that you are only decrementing each letter by one – so if your password is “IBM” it becomes “HAL” when “encrypted”. This isn’t a true, nor secure encryption; and keeping the details of the encryption secret don’t make it more secure.
This brings me to the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend. This is basically the idea that employees, rather than using company issued work stations, could simply bring their own computing device and access corporate systems from that.
Too many people are focusing on the risks of BYOD rather than the opportunities. Do we have to code for multiple devices? What about security on their device? What happens when they resign? What right does the company have to the personal property?
But the reality is this is just like security by obscurity. We have been living in a world deluded into thinking that things would be simpler, and more efficient, if we all conformed. If only everybody had the same desktop environment, and we didn’t let anybody change anything without calling (and being told “no”) by the IT help desk.
We were living with the illusion of what I call “simplicity by conformity”. We choose an arbitrary object – our work stations – and decided everything would be better if they were all the same. But this simplification never happened. People had to find work-arounds to the rules that tried to create this conformity. And they weren’t finding work arounds for the fun of it. They were finding work arounds in order to try and simplify areas that actually mattered: servicing customers, working efficiently, collaborating with their teams.
So I see BYOD as the end of “simplicity by conformity”. By taking control of the device out of the equation we are forced to create rules that simplify things that actually matter. Real simplicity.
One last point – people working on their own device expect it to operate like their own device. If the attention economy has taught us anything it’s that we’ll shift our attention to things that are more entertaining – or those that have greater usability. Imagine how difficult it is to keep yourself from distractions as you work on your computer at work – and then magnify that by each distraction you’ll find on your own device.
The challenge of distraction is another hidden false assurance. We can no longer pretend that boring, meaningless work will be done efficiently because there is nothing else to do. BYOD will reignite the need to create engaging work. Conformity by engagement, perhaps? Perhaps not. But engagement around things that actually mater.
How many times have you had an employee come to you with a complaint about how a process works, or how an IT system is broken, or how they aren’t getting along with another department, and you’ve basically counselled them. You’ve told them how they might get a better result if they approach the situation a different way. Maybe you’ve suggested that they escalate this to another person. Perhaps you’ve even brokered a meeting where the two groups just sit together to rebuild their relationship – just try and see it from each other’s point of view.
You take this approach because people management is important, right? You take this approach because “it’s all about people”. But don’t you think if the system wasn’t broken there would be less of these “people issues”? It’s the most respectful thing you can do for the people in your organisation to make the organisation itself work better?
That fact of the matter is that your people are not your most important asset. Your systems are your most important asset. Because when your systems work, and make it easy for your people to operate your organisation (i.e. what I call “organisational usability”) then your people will stay. Your “assets” support your customers first, and your people second. And that is all. To say your people are “assets” is actually pretty offensive.
The fast is you need good people if you want to change anything. People have ideas, people make stuff happen. But the more you are relying on people to do basic tasks, work arounds, and counselling sessions, the more you are destroying the competitiveness of your business by adding unnecessary costs to the cost structure.
The idea that you should focus on making your organisation a “great place to work” doesn’t contradict this in the slightest. Being a great place to work means the people in your organisation aren’t constantly trying to avoid being the ones who do the low value jobs. Being a “great place to work” means that management systems are in place that ensure that you don’t have to suck up to your line manager in order to be recognised for your contribution.
Constantly focusing on the people, at the exclusion of focusing on the systems, is completely counter-productive. Of course, I mean “systems” broadly, beyond IT systems. But more importantly, I mean the systems that create a set of unique capabilities controlled by your organisation and connect those capabilities to customers.
The only reason managers focus on people is that they want to manage them – read: control them. If you make everything into a people issue you don’t have to fix your partner eco-system, you don’t need to have a strategy, and you don’t need to manage risk. Or more importantly, you can focus on your own career progression rather than making the systems work for people who operate them (too cynical, perhaps?).
By focusing only on people you just get to wake up in the morning, see what’s failed and fire somebody, or ask everybody how they are adding value and let them take the effort to justify. This is the extreme but natural conclusion of how focusing on people plays out. By only focusing on people you’ll find yourself saying things like “Bob doesn’t get it” when there is no “it” to get. Like I’ve said before “management at it’s worst is the art of saying ‘you’re not seeing the big picture – even when there clearly isn’t one'”.
The more you focus on the people, and the less you focus on the systems, the more you’ll need to focus on the people. People in an untidy, unstructured, and ultimately political environment will undoubtably require more attention. People who need to end their day manually collating information and re-typing into systems that don’t work will require more attention. People who need to collaborate across teams where no agreed protocols exist will require more conflict management. People who need to suddenly “do more with less” will – by definition – actually do less with less until the systems change.
It’s time to respect people by managing systems.
Sometimes, where we are trying to sell technology, we fall into the trap of looking at one of the varieties of tea we have and asking “So, customer, what type of breakfast would you like in your tea?” These questions are trying to be helpful; but they don't make any sense to anybody and they reveal that you've already got an answer in mind that you don't fully understand.
Posted with BlogsyOne of the original tenants of MWT was that management itself would have to change if everybody was already managing themselves. I was responding to much of the discussion 10-15 years ago that was about “empowering” the workforce and I wanted to think ahead to the situation where everybody really was empowered and really was managing themselves. This is, of course, actually happening all around us…
I think the same thing goes for “agile”(*). I’m often surrounded by people adopting somewhat “agile” practices. Simple things like “stand up” meetings.
The only problem is – and this bugs me more than it probably should – I don’t know what a “stand up meeting” actually is? I don’t mean I don’t understand the concept, I just mean it doesn’t make sense to call it a “stand up meeting” anymore when everybody is doing it.
In a typical week I might be aware of or participate in 5-10 “stand up” meetings. And every time one of these is on I hear people calling out “hey everyone time for the stand up meeting”. This isn’t helpful at all. Which one? What will be discussed? Should I be there?
The other interesting part is that I often see people walk out of the stand up meeting and discuss their actions with other people who weren’t in the stand up meeting. This isn’t helpful either. The purpose of the stand up meeting is to get everybody prepared for their day. If the people whose day you are preparing aren’t in the meeting than it’s not really helpful.
A stand up meeting that doesn’t involve the people who will be impacted today with significant effort driven from the stand up meeting is simply a management meeting, standing up, which doesn’t have a sufficient planning horizon to add value, make a strategic impact, or give other resources sufficient lead time to plan their own activities.
(*) Note: I’m by no means an “agile” expert. Nor do I think it’s the answer for many problems to which it is applied. I like it though.
My ever-charming wife is currently in Tasmania “doing zoology like a boss” to help understand the impacts on behavior of the facial tumor disease that has decimated the Tasmanian Devil population over the last 15 years or so.
Amanda traps the devils, tags them, and ensures that a bunch of very relevant tests are performed. Just as importantly, she also helps name each of the devils trapped after a prominent “gay” actor: Portia, Rupert, Tom, etc.
In the week she has been away so far she has trapped the allegedly bi-sexual Warren twice. The first time he seemed quite afraid when they released him – uncertain of what might happen.
Interestingly, the second time they trapped him he wasn't scared at all when he was released. He seemed to know he was safe. He looked around a bit and just sort-of wandered off.
This is “pricing it”. It's the process of gaining clarity of the costs and risks. Once something is priced decisions can be made. The increased clarity of the price doesn't always mean incidents of it will go down – it doesn't always create a disincentive – it just creates a price.
The price for Warren eating the free lamb that the traps are deliciously bated with is that he has to spend a day or so in a plastic tube and get a couple of harmless tests done.
As the price is now known it can be used in decision-making. As the price is low, it will be paid more often. The reasonably priced lamb will be consumed more often than unexpected lamb, that looks suspiciously like a trap, with an unknown price.
This is of course just like the famous after-school child care example. In this case the child-care facility decided to charge people for being late to collect their children. This was because they got sick of waiting for late parents.
The only problem was that after they put a price on the late collection of their children the number of late pick-ups actually increased! Because they had priced the after hours care people could decide to use it with no guilt.
The second problem was that the when they stopped the trial and changed back to a zero-penalty policy for late pick up, the number of late pick-ups increased yet again! The parents treated the “new” no-fee policy like after-school care was now on sale! 100% off after hours child care!
(see original paper here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.37.1417&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
So, do you want to “price it”? Really?
I have been trying subtly shift people from saying “big data” to saying “complex events” for some time now. But perhaps I was being too subtle.
Big Data, like master data management (MDM) and customer relationship management (CRM) before it, has a problem. The problem is that's it's a true innovation – so nobody understands it.
Also, it is an innovation that is technology-driven in the sense that it is something that wasn't possible without advances in technology. However, again like MDM and CRM this distinction between being technology-driven and being a true innovation is hard to manage. For these types of innovations, eventually (or rather almost instantly in the case of big data) the phrase is adopted by vendors and then becomes just “a set of technologies” rather than the innovation that those technologies have enabled.
The simplest solution to this problem is to two names. One name for the problem and one name for the solution. In this case the problem is “complex events” and the solution is “big data”. More specifically, the problem is complex events over mixed granularity and time, where some data is a proxy for other data.
Firstly, let's clarify what we mean by a simple event. Take a look at that following row of data:
This data represents a simple event. The way we understand this data as an event is also simple. We just have to put some clear labels on the data, and resolve any codes used, and we can quickly see that the event was the purchase of 2 blue ballpoint pens.
As this is a simple event it lacks the features of a complex event. This purchase occurred at a single moment – in this case some time on the 12th of May 2012. We can debate how accurately we can see the time of the event but this is the type of event that is described entirely at one particular moment.
The second significant feature that the simple event lacks is mixed granularity. Note that the price shown is the price of a single pen. There is also no complexity beyond simple multiplication in determining the total price involved in the event. There is no reference to things like “the total value of pens that the particular person has bought in their lifetime” that is fundamental to understanding the event.
Thirdly, all of the information provided to describe the event is directly related to the transaction. Even the numerical code used to identify that the product was a pen is just a code to simplify some uses of the information. The event wasn't a transaction to acquire part of the means to produce a letter to the purchase's wife's mother. While this might be true it is not part of the event.
These characteristics are what make the event simple. Complex events have the opposite characteristics. Managing these events takes data of mixed granularity, mixed time periods, and includes some data that is a proxy for other data.
If the purchase of the pen itself is a simple event then the decision to buy a pen is a complex event. You might sketch this decision as follows:
In fact, you could quickly add even more complexity to this sketch. This is a genuinely complex event. It crosses time periods because if you are going to be home in 20 minutes and you know you have pens there you don't have to buy one now.
If you are trying to encourage this person to buy a pen you will need to mix granularity and use proxies for the information in the buyer's head. You may know that pens displayed at the front counter sell better than pens at the back of the counter – and you can use this aggregated information – which is a proxy and at a different level of granularity to the rest of the event – when managing the event.
Big Data then is the technology that you can use if you want to understand, influence the outcomes of, or otherwise manage complex events. When big data is presented as Volume, Variety, Variability (etc.) it could be argued that these are features of the data required to support complex events rather than features of big data.
You will often hear “that's not a real big data problem!” which is true but equally you could say “that's not a complex event!”. Importantly, while you could apply the technology of big data to problems that are not real big data problems a complex event is a complex event.
Some may suggest that this distinction between simple and complex events has always been true – and they would be right. The concepts are not new. However, it shouldn't be suggested that we had the ability to manage complex events before the technology allowed us to do so.
It is true that we have been able to create computerised models for some time which have allowed us to, for example, generated a list of customers likely to churn, or pre-process a reasonably accurate next best offer for a customers. However, there is a difference between being able to provide business intelligence and analytical insights across domains where complex events exist, compared to actually being able to work with the complex events themselves, in real-time, across broad domains, cost effectively, and with minimum engineering investment.
So, it's the “complex event” revolution we should be exalting not the “big data” revolution.