ManageWithoutThem

It’s time to change the way we think about escalations in preparation for the organisations of the future.

The word “escalation” has an ominous tone. In corporate cultures skewed by managerialism – that is, most organisations – escalations get a reputation as being a risk to your career.

An escalation is often seen as a failure to collaborate, when in reality it’s a mismatch between the level of the organisation where particular decision rights currently sit versus the availability of information required to make those decisions.

As with performance management, the discipline of general management has focused the management of escalations on the people aspects of the process. People are very important, I grant. But when any process too heavily focuses on the people aspects the unintended consequence is that people are identified as the problem, and only people-focused solutions are found.

Performance Management, while ultimately concerned with the performance of the whole organisation, makes us think of yearly performance management processes focused on individuals.  Progress to change to this slow, hard, work that’s against most corporate cultures.  Changeling our approach to escalations will be the same.

Neither escalations nor performance management have much to do with individual behaviours. Performance management is simply about measuring and optimising performance. This might involve people’s behaviours but is actually a bundle of people, process, information, and technology (where those words are defined so broadly as to mean they encompass every possible thing).

The correct way of thinking about an escalation is to think of it as moving a decision-making process or instance of a decision to the appropriate level of the organisation. If something is escalated it couldn’t be resolved where is it was.

Escalation is simply the opposite of delegation. Our organisations are comfortable with the idea of increasing spans of control, and reducing layers of management. This means there are positive delegation flows occurring in all high performaninng organisations.

It makes sense that continuous optimisation of an organisation undergoing change also includes cases where decision processes or instances of decisions need to be escalated.

Automation trends therefore offer a challenge to the general management discipline. Automation means that delegation and escalation are often to or from “robots” rather than people.  This is having a profound effect on management.

In an organisation governed, managed, and executed by people an escalation is a handy escape value. Those executing the work get to shift a decision to the right level of the organisation.

But because managerialism has been people focused it’s become confused about delegation and escalation. If a person has been delegated to and doesn’t make the right decisions it’s considered a failing. Similarly, if a person escalates when they were not supposed to, or doesn’t escalate when they are supposed to this is also considered a failing.

Organisations that a governed by people, managed by people, but in part executed by machines bring the ambiguity about escalation and delegation to a sharp point. If a machine isn’t performing delegated tasks it’s the fault of the delegator. Similarly, if a machine isn’t escalating at the right time it’s the fault of whoever it’s supposed to be escalating to.

Australian regulator ACCC recently came to the reasonable conclusion that when an automated decision process makes multiple incorrect (and in this case illegal) decisions, or omits steps it was legally obligated to perform, the organisation is break the law multiple times. This is as opposed to breaking the law once via the single programming error that caused the multiple illegal actions.

See Tweet: https://twitter.com/matthewdegeorge/status/931256101818966016

“You cannot avoid liability by saying ‘my robot did it’” #ai https://t.co/2y9Ki4v8c2

— Matthew De George (@matthewdegeorge) November 16, 2017

This is profound. It means our understanding of delegations  and escalations needs to change. It’s also why an organisation that is governed by people, managed by robots, and executed by people might actually be a more likely future form than organisations where only the execution is robotic.

As per the battle between general management and architecture, it’s getting close to the cross over point:

Aegon: Make Management Your Business Partner for Successful EA Implementation

The recent “Is Government IT Getting Worse?” provided just enough of an overview of the state of digital government to get me fired up.  

I don’t understand why we keep reviewing these things called “IT Projects”. For as long as I can remember we have been saying “it’s not an IT project, it’s a business project”. I got sick of hearing it not because it wasn’t true but because it was trite.

But we are still assessing “IT projects” and trying to improve the IT parts of change efforts in isolation. 

The inevitable result of this is either over engineered “requirements” focused effort or the popular half-solution to half-the-problem that is “agile”. 

While it wasn’t always the case, over the last 10 years or so every IT department I have worked with has had a more ounerous and often self-imposed discipline around managing change projects than other “departments”.  

You read that right – IT departments are trying desperately to improve their project based discipline and have pushed ahead of most other departmental or cross department program management office (PMO) initiatives. 

I see it everywhere. But because IT departments are taking the time to package change as projects they are subsequently driven into a position where they have to justify spend more elaborately. Also, where they have to justify spend more elaborately this makes IT change more project based.  

On the demand side, PMO initiatives have been dumbed down so much that without the discipline imposed by IT they would have almost no impact.  

Perhaps the worst combination is “the business” trying to take control of IT with the IT department letting them (i.e. “Agile”).  

Of course, there are improvements and a backlash against this approach. Much of the “digital” discussion is trying to solve this too – in ways I don’t always agree with. But while I often don’t agree with Paul Shetler when he talks about fixing procurement as an enabler of better digital outcomes he is spot on.

But in terms of having to justify the activities, IT departments always get a raw deal. It’s very difficult to justify IT activities in the same way you justify activities that have more concrete outcomes. “IT Projects” when defined as such cannot claim or commit to many sorts of benefits because they are by definition just the “IT” parts of the initiative.  

So when you assess “IT Projects” you are assessing an increasingly arbitrary sub-set of the value chain towards outcomes.  

You have to assess value creative, and change initiatives as a whole – not just the IT bits. 

Whatever effort you assess as “IT projects”, you can guarantee there is double that being spent on “IT” in other budgets. Also, you can guarantee some of the service outcomes being attributed to IT spend are from initiatives that never had any IT spend allocated to them in the first place. Or that had insufficient IT spend allocated to them. 

Rather than yet again assessing the “IT Projects” why not assess change initiatives in general? Why not look at:

• Change initiatives such as new policy deployment, data capture and form changes, new business-lead deployments of technology and see how they were managed
• Where change initiatives didn’t have IT budget the ownous must be on the initiative to justify why. Surely, every change initiative has IT impacts – at the very least on capacity of standardised IT services
• Where change initiatives did have IT budget how do they compare in performance to “IT Projects”? (Oops, now I’m doing it)
• What was the contribution of these change initiatives and how did they impact service?

We live in a world that is capability-based. The functional organisation is completely dead. The idea of an “IT Project” is completely dead. 

By continuing to look at inherently disconnected initiatives like this we are causing more problems than we are solving. 

It also means we have to be careful about delivery approaches. When an “IT Project” is spending 60% of its budget on design thinking workshops to try to change the way service is delivered that is in some ways admirable. But it’s not “IT spend” in the sense that it is guaranteed to improve outcomes that would be attributed to IT. In fact, it might arbitrarily reduce the investment in certain types of quality. Less time coding is less quality – regardless of how much of an improvement there is in what is being coded against what would have been coded.  

There is a massive trend as organisations shift and The Death of the Functional Organisation occurs.  There are three effects of this on every profession / silo / function.  

They all:

1. Normalise to soft platitudes at the top end.  Each function says it “… wont succeed without executive support”, “… is all about collaboration and leadership”, etc

2. Focus on getting others to recognise the value of their datasets.  “… integrate our data into operations”

3. Try to build a comprehensive theory of the firm where there profession is the key.  Eg. “Organisations are really all about change”

The latest example is the “tax” function of all things:

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/The-Marriage-of-Tax-and-Strategy

As usual there are some great points in this article – but they are part of a trend towards capability-based governance rather than about the importance of the tax function specifically.  

When I began my career in the 1990s I quickly got frustrated with the idea that “quality is everybody’s responsibility”. If you remember corporate environments at that time you’ll remember this expression. To me it didn’t mean much. To me this was like saying your happiness is your own responsibility. It was self-evidently true but I had to wonder why I would waste my time listening to somebody tell me that. I naturally wondered what was in it for them.I don’t hear that phase as much anymore. It started to disappear when it was replaced by “the customer is at the centre of everything we do”. Of course, I had issues with this phrase too. Like the quality people, I couldn’t really understand how people got paid to say such trivial platitudes. I didn’t even think it was helpful to think that organisations should consider the customer to be the centre of everything they did. In fact, to me it sounded too internally focused. When I engaged at all it was to declare that “the customer is at the centre of everything they do – that’s what customer centric actually means!”.

What does this have to do with information management? Well, you might have heard recently that data is really important. It’s the latest craze. It didn’t start with big data but that’s certainly when it went mainstream. You know that’s when it went mainstream because the time between when it was cool to talk about big data and when it was cool to diss big data was about 3 months. Every big data article now proudly declares how contrarian they are by saying it’s not really how big your data is it’s how you use it – or some such chant. For some it’s supposedly really all about “fast data”. Others will say it’s not about data it’s about information. It’s all semantics – and those in information management should find that ironic.  

My personal attempt at the anti- big data spin was to call it “cheap data”. This is no less obnoxious than the others and I apologise for it. But cheap data at least explains why their is so much of it about. With so much data of course comes so much data management. The real disciplines of data and information management are quite mature. I’ve worked with people who have been information management professionals for 25 years. There are deep knowledge bases around how to manage information of both the practical and academic variety.  

Real information management professionals have a deep and complex relationship with all things information. The field is highly specialised and filled with professionals who have their own specialised language and techniques . 

My career is basically 25 years of technology enabled business transformation – starting with the modest business transformation of how wooden pallets were tracked for a small fruit shop that I wrote a tracking program for when I was 17. However, from an information management professional perspective I’m not allowed to say I have 25 years experience. Instead, I have about 5 years experience. This is because information management has a long history and the specialisation is deep. 

I’d also suggest my 5 years experience is only half “real” information management experience because the other half was spent stripping out all of the information management jargon and breaking up endless arguments between information management professionals. That is to say, I spent a lot of time trying to stop information management people talking and getting them listening. But this process – while a nessesary and important part of the mass consumerisation of information management – is unfair on those “real” information management professionals.  

Information management is a mature specialised discipline. But it’s also at the same point that the quality movement was when it endlessly declared “quality is everybody’s responsibility”. When data got cheap, and became the biggest story in town, information management was suddenly everywhere. But that meant it had to appeal to a broad audience. Which meant that deep and specialised language had to go out the window.  

While many concepts deep in the details all of those information management skills are still useful – just like being able to look up a book in a library catalogue is still useful – ultimately the level of broad communication about information management that most organisations can tolerate before they switch off is basically “data is everybody’s responsibility”.  

As I’ve said often before, the discipline of general management is unkind to specialisation – wishing and hoping that complexity and nuance is unceremoniously removed from all things for the convenience of centralised decision-making and at the expense of distributed decision-making power (and ultimately decision effectiveness). For all the intolerance to specialisation that general management has this is nothing compared to the compromises that must be made when appealing to the masses. Data management is the new quality management and is changing so it appeals to the masses. This is in many ways a penultimate step in the evolution of any intellectual centre.  

Short of building another organisational silo and trying to move all of your data management into it, you’re basically in the territory of culture change if you want to broadly impact how your organisation uses data.  But once you’re appealing to something as broad as cultural change you’re out of the realm of specialisation and closer to the realm of politics – for better and for worse.  

Information management is a rich and specialised set of disciplines that help you manage your information once you’re willing to accept you have a problem managing your information. It also includes a number of governance and discovery disciplines that help you identity that you have a problem if you’re willing to invest in information the same way you invest in other assets. 

This is all well and good by why do that? I understand that when information is wrong it could lead to misunderstanding of risk. Or that when information is wrong it might impact customer experience. I consult in this area so I’m happy to tell you that you might not be meeting your regulatory obligations unless you are both managing information according to certain standards and able to attest to the accuracy of that information.  

But why view this as an information problem? How is this different to “just focusing on the technology”? I’ve seen many initiatives fail with a retrospective 20-20 hindsight assessment that they failed because they only focused on the technology. It’s true that initiatives must focus on more than just the technology. Great – we should do that. We should also avoid using negations to describe what we should do. You can’t focus on “not the technology” you have to focus on something specific. Equally, you can’t use “the business” for shorthand. There isn’t such a thing.  

Just like only focusing on the technology will give poor outcomes. Only focusing on the information will give poor outcomes.  

This idea that a kind of functional excellence in information management is holding organisations back is a fallacy. The real problems have nothing to do with a lack of functional excellence in a seperate information function. The real issues are general management, accountability for details, mis-investment in technology, and apathy at the margin.

Everybody likes to say that “the business owns the information”. This is absolutely true. Why are we even talking about this? We can reinforce our message by saying “the information isn’t owned by IT”. Again, this is absolutely fine. I personally could imagine an organisation where “information is owned by IT”. This seems sacrilegious and against all good information management principles but I don’t see why an organisation wouldn’t be allowed to operate this way. IT is in fact part of this mythical amalgamation known as “the business” and IT does stand for “information technology”. You could interpret information technology to mean the techniques and tools to manage information. And you tend to only manage things you own. Perhaps the IT department would make a good custodian for all an organisation’s information assets.  In fact, in many organisations this is the case. The only thing missing is recognition that data in one of those pesky little details you your IT department has been building capability in for years without due recognition.  

When I started work my payslips were hand-written by a clerk in payroll. That process was owned by the head of payroll. The accountability for delivering my payslip was with the head of payroll but the responsibility for creating the payslip was with that clerk. We’ve all heard this language before. But the fact is, today an IT system prints my payslip. If the printer breaks a tech support person fixes it. Often they don’t know how to fix the problem – so they learn. If the system crashes when they try to run payroll you can bet the email will say “payroll has been delayed because of a computer issue”. The person who needs to fix this issue might have only started in the job the day before – so they’ll have to learn many things before they can fix it – so they’ll start learning those things. And yet, the “business owner” for that system is still the head of payroll.  

In the information management world, that ownership of the payroll system is a different beast to the ownership and accuracy of the payroll information itself. This is a powerful concept in information management. It’s particularly powerful for information assets that have a more complex lifecycle than payroll information. But so what? We have all the accountability for getting payroll right that we need. Even for more complex information assets, if accountability is in place for the outcomes that rely on that information what more accountability do we need?  Just as “… including accuracy of data”.

The truth is that when we manage accountability for outcomes many organisations have operated on an implicit assumption that that accountability excluded the data. Somehow the data was determined to be just another one of those minor details that were considered above the general management discipline where accountability is defined. So the only change is to explicitly change this implicit assumption that accountability excludes data details.

So I guess what I’m saying is…

“Data is everybody’s responsibility”