MediaSpace Wiki

Organizational Spr2006 Sess09

Next Index Card Assignment (Due today)

Identify at least three groups of people who work inside your groups organization. Identify at least three groups of people outside the organization who depend on or have a stake in the success of your groups organization.

When things go wrong: Changing the System

• I/CT's - Information and Communication Technologies
• Reengineering
• Some less than successful implementations
  1. A customer service system (telephone support)
     • Goals:
       1. Increase time spent talking with customers
       2. Decrease time interacting with peers
     • Implementation:
       • Electronic Trouble Ticket System
       • If you can't handle the question, pass it on
     • Effect
       • Disconnected workers from the "human database"
       • Created a dissociated aggregate
       • A workaround
     • Informal practice
       • An informal networking system that allowed workers to interact covertly
       • Widespread deception of the record-keeping system
     • System changes eventually resolved these problems
  2. A police patrol radio system
     • Goals:
       1. A higher quality and more secure radio dispatch system that would make it easier to do database searches.
       2. A lower cost dispatching systems in which clerks with no police experience, supplemented by computer data, could replace higher-cost officer dispatchers.
       3. Centralized communications that gave district managers more control of cars on patrol (e.g. micromanagement).
     • Implementation:
       1. Comprehensive computer database, including detailed mapping software
       2. Digital and voice communication in the police cars
       3. Centralized interaction, with all radio communication flowing through dispatchers
     • Effects:
       • Mostly positive, but
       • The maps were not sufficient and the clerk dispatchers didn't have the knowledge to transcend their limitations or to properly understand what officers were requesting.
       • With entirely centralized communication, officers couldn't interact with each other directly, this losing the "human database"
     • Informal Practice:
       • Officers supplemented the official police radio system with an informal C.B. radio system, re-enabling contact with each other.
     • System changes eventually resolved these problems
  3. A hospital patient tracking system
     • Goals:
       1. Improve patient monitoring with a portable system
     • Implementation:
       1. Walkman-sized unit strapped to ambulatory patients
       2. Antennas in hallways picked up signals and put into monitoring system
       3. No training or support structure
     • Effect:
       1. No significant use
     • Informal Practice:
       1. The system was dropped without a reasonable tryout
     • In the end, road kill in the process of organizational innovation
  4. An electronic forms management system
     • Goals:
       1. Route all forms through a single forms management system
       2. Improve forms processing workflow
       3. Reduce clerical staff
     • Implementation:
       1. A requirements and design process engaged relevant groups
       2. A jurisdictional rivalry emerged involving the part of the company that would take the staff reduction
       3. Regional and divisional divisions weren't accounted for
     • Effect:
       1. An extended requirements process as additional concerns were addressed
       2. A range of system compromises that reduced the value of the system
     • Informal Practice:
       1. The scope of the system was reduced, with several system goals left unsatisfied.
     • System changes eventually resolved these problems
• Lessons: Why productivity enhancements fail
  1. Work is situated in work communities in which members collect knowledge of how a job is done.
     • Ignoring that knowledge and the value of that knowledge is a recipe for failure.
     • Facing such failures, work communities react by modifying the system
  2. Work patterns and structures emerge in response to many contingencies, including the media with which they are implemented in
     • Systems re-implementing systems are likely to have very different requirements
     • Failing to restructure organizational structures in tandem with the new implementation is a recipe for failure.
  3. Work is generally situated within the context of complex organizational politics.
     • Ignoring the competing interests that surround an implementation is a recipe for failure.
     • Stakeholders who are threatened by a new implementation will work to undermine it.
  4. Implementations that force work to be done in a different way prevent people from adapting to changes in the environment.
     • Creating implementations that don't allow users to change/customize the system to local needs is a recipe for failure.

The Systems Perspective

• From a systems perspective, an organization is not just a collection of people
  • Its an artifact, constructed by its members, that has the potential achieve more than its members might achieve individually
    • A place where 1+1 can equal 3
• The systems perspective is a response to "reductionism"
  • Breaking a system down into its fundamental components
  • And studying those components in isolation in the hope of better understanding the system
  • Systems thinking says that this doesn't work
    • because it misses the context all the other pieces provide
    • because it misses the interaction of all the pieces
  • But systems theory still has to structure things
    • So the pieces don't go away
    • The system theorist just doesn't study them in isolation
    • Simon's (1968) model of artifacts captures some of this

• Note here that for our purposes:
  • The organization is the artifact

• Information theory and the Shannon Model come from systems theory:
• The interactive (or cybernetic) model also comes from systems theory:
• The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
• Relationships are what makes a group a system
  • Perhaps the big lesson of Hawthorne Studies
  • Productivity is a function of expectations and relationships
  • People are not just parts in a machine
• Examples
  • Physics
    • Bodies trapped in space and time affect space and time
      • Suggestive of issues in time and motion studies
        • Meeting one goal may impede another (efficiency and taste)
        • What are the intended and unintended effects of increased or decreased efficiency?
        • How does productivity affect morale, turnover, absenteeism, and training costs?
  • Biology
    • Using living systems a a metaphor for machines and social systems
    • Communication is the process of organizing (Farace, Monge, and Russell)
      • Cybernetics and feedback
• What is a system?
  • A complex set of relationships between interdependent parts.
    • Closed systems are entirely self-reliant:
    • Open systems are exposed to an outside environment:
      • This is true of all organizations.
        • Competition
        • Influences from without
        • Scanning to anticipate
        • Coopetition
          • Development consortiums
          • Business Partner Relationships
        • Internal and External Stakeholders:
          • Internal
            • Management
            • Employees
          • Boundary
            • Stockholders
            • Employee Representatives
          • External
            • Customers
            • The Community
            • Government
            • The Media

• Elements of systems
  • Components (Mediators in communication systems) or Static structures
  • Assemblies of Components or Clockworks
  • Organization of Components or Control Mechanisms
  • A larger systems in which a system is embedded (e.g. systems are open
• Characteristics of systems
  • Environment
  • Interdependence
    • Unawareness of interdependence can be an issue that prevents incremental improvement
    • Cross-Training
    • Productivity Circles
    • Reengineering
  • Goals
    • Different participants/stakeholders have different goals
    • Those goals interact and must sometimes be negotiated
    • Equifinality: Goals can be reached multiple ways
  • Processes and Feedback
    • Consider keeping a canoe straight
  • Order
    • Greater openness increases the complexities
• The problem with system theory has been
  • this complexity
    • requires advanced multivariate time series methodologies
  • it isn't easy to do experiments in real organizations
    • the theory, for the most part, is not tested
  • conceptually useful, but hard to prove in practice

Group Assignment due Monday

Compile as a complete a list as possible of the internal and external stakeholders associated with your groups organization.