MediaSpace Wiki

Organizational Spr2006 Sess18

Agenda

Collect Short papers
Collect Questions
A quick look ahead
- Spring break starts Saturday
- We have class on Friday. I will treat it like any other day.
- Your next short paper is due two weeks after you return
  - It is a research paper
  - Again focused on your stakeholder
  - But exploring what the literature has to say about what kinds of communication are effective in communicating with that stakeholder
- The group project is due three weeks after you return
  - It is a comprehensive overview of your organizations stakeholders and the ways in which the organization communicates with them.
- Term papers are due five weeks after you return
  - Term papers will integrate and extend these materials
- We will also resume work on your group activities when we return.
  - At the end of the first week after coming back each group should have a plan for how they can publicize their portion of the BOINC SUNY Oswego team on campus. More on that a week from Monday.
Applying Structuration in the workplace
Analyzing Organizational Failure

Applying Structuration in the Workplace

Exercise:
- http://davis.foulger.info/oswego/Spring2003/Organizational/fourLayouts.htm
- Which layout would be most effective for:
  - Editing articles as the come in and publishing them on a web site?
  - Answering questions independently as a telephone help desk?
  - Making minute by minute decisions about price changes at mall cookie stores?
  - Working together to solve a problem in an emergency?
Today we want to bring together some key ideas
1. Business processes structures the activities of an organization
  - The structure allows many people to achieve things together that none could do individually
  - But it also creates bureaucratic strictures that can prevent things from getting done
  - Hence business processes are both
    - constantly under pressure to change, and
    - greatly resistant to change
  - The resolution of that duality is the essence of structuration
2. Business processes are never entirely under management control
  - The people who have to do the work have to work out the details
  - Management may never even be aware of those details
  - And those details may include substantial bypasses of the "official process"
  - Preventing those bypasses is a recipe for disaster
    - As we saw in the police radio system we discussed last time
    - They eventually bought their own radios and bypassed the "official" system
3. Communication is the primary modality of structuration in organizations
  - This is true at several levels
    1. Communication is the primary activity of most organizations
    2. Communication is the modality through which management communicates the "official process"
    3. Communication is the modality through which the people who do the work negotiate the details
      - often tacitly, but still effectively
      - the structure of business processes is a negotiation
4. We select media to solve problems of
  - time
  - space
  - scale
  - productivity
  - value
  - etc.
- Structuration occurs as a function of solving these problems
  - using a selection of media (generally more than one)
  - and adopting a set of practices that governs our interaction in those media
  - among other things, those practices structure most business processes into narratives
    - with well defined beginnings, middles, and ends
    - we often use the ends as a measure of productivity

All of this matters to the meta-process of "Business Process Reengineering"
- Redesigning business processes to be:
  - more productive
  - more effective
  - more cost effective
- Often with a substantial assist from Computer-Based Media
  - Database technology
  - Content transformation and indexing technology
  - Workflow management systems
  - Group Decision Support Systems
  - Groupware
  - and other information and communication technologies (ICTs)
- We've already seem examples of business process failed reengineering
- What can we do to minimize the problems?
Let's consider Taylor's example from chapter 3, taken from Suchman
- The ecology
  - An airport operations control room
    - 5 people
    - Common space
    - Open
    - Monitors show gates/tarmac

A Boarding Gate
- Gate Attendent
The Airplane
- Pilot and Crew
- Flight Attendants
- Passengers
The Tarmac
- Mechanics
Others, including other airlines and a parts depot

The event (a narrative)
- Beginning
  - Flight pulls in (Equilibrium)
  - Passenger unloading stair breaks down (Disequilibrium)
- Middle (Twists and Turns)
  - Operations notified
    - Pilot calls in
    - A Handles
    - B comments in parallel
    - PP comes in and gets ball rolling
    - Supervisor brings in 5th member, BP
  - Maintenance mobilized
  - Pilot advised
    - Passengers Advised
  - Other airlines asked for help (temporary loan)
  - Maintenance fixes pump
- End
  - Crisis resolved (Return to Equilibrium)
The media
- Gate attendant behavior: indication of crisis
- Pilot on radio: notification of crisis
- Interpersonal interaction between operations center staff
  - Gesture
  - Tone
- Video monitors: problem becomes visible
- Telephone: maintenance notified
- P.A. System: Pilot reassures passengers
- Walky Talky: maintenance interaction with parts
- Head-Complement Interaction: supervisor brings in more op center staff
  - Touch
- Room arrangement
Undocumented co-activity
- Maintenance interaction on diagnosis, part, replacement
- Gate activity
- Public monitor activity
Note that different media solve different problems in this narrative
- An ecology of media brought to bear on a routine crisis
- Just another routine crisis!

Lessons:
1. Management is often an afterthought
  - Well trained people who know their jobs will usually self-manage
  - that certainly happened here. The supervisor was the fourth participant in the op center
2. Interaction matters
  - Resolution of the crisis required interaction across multiple intersecting media
  - Designing any of the interaction of of the system can create problems
3. System/Process bypasses are important
  - The formal process would almost certainly start with the gate attendant
  - But the pilot has a bypass such that the problem is resolved more quickly
4. Flexibility is important
  - Every member of the op center team had specific responsibilities
  - But by pitching in together they resolve the crisis more quickly
5. Relationships matter
  - One of the reasons this team is able to react quickly is that they know each other and can pick up on nuances
6. Understanding the process matters to any attempt to reengineer it
  - What would happen if we were to do even trivial changes to this system without considering the teams interplay
  - http://davis.foulger.info/oswego/Spring2003/Organizational/fourLayouts.htm
7. New media may not be the solution
  - Every person in this control room has a computer and, one presumes, a range of computer-based media at their disposal (at least e-mail).
  - There is no indication that these media are used in resolving this event.

So how do we take advantage of these lessons:
1. Root reengineering in research
  - Get requirements from the people who do the work. Managers may not know.
  - A $50,000 ethnography of a business process is only expensive
    - Until you consider that a system that costs $100 million to build
    - may cost $100 million to replace if it doesn't work
2. Test reengineering before deploying it
  - A business process is a lot more complicated than a user interface
  - and it may be harder to test
  - but its cheaper to fix before deployment than after
  - Testing WHILE developing is even better
3. Engineer system bypasses into the system
  - Its a lot faster and cheaper to allow the people who do the work to adapt the system
  - Then it is to report system failures as bugs to be fixed in the next release
4. Tolerate a certain amount of misuse of the system
  - That is generally how people learn to use the system
  - When crisis hits its the relationships built on misuse that solve the problems.

Analyzing Organizational Failure

Chapter 7 is the postmortem of the Challenger accident
- The details of what brought the shuttle down aren't of particular interest here
  - A piece of foam almost certainly put a hole in the leading edge of one wing
  - That hole let hot plasma into the wing
  - Which superheated the aluminum from the inside
  - And caused the wing to fail.
- The organizational failures that preceded the failure are of interest:
  - An accident rooted "in NASA's history and the human flight program's culture"
  - Under schedule and cost pressures, flight criteria are subtly altered
    - Often based on apparently logical arguments in three stages:
      1. Identification of/ Acceptance of Anomaly
      2. Argument over the acceptability of the Risk
      3. Decision
    - Faster conspires with cheaper to eliminate better
      - A legacy of a Reagan/Bush era administrator
      - and the application of Deming's principles
        Elimination of bureaucratic controls via delegation of decision making to the lowest possible level
        Elimination of checks and balances via delegation of quality control to the lowest possible level
        Moving work out to contractors
        An overall 25% work reduction
  - In the face of this, minimization of risk
    - Denial of imaging (three times)
    - Description of debris strike as a "turnaround issue"
    - Eight other missed opportunities to observe the possible damage, including a spacewalk
    - Requirement that the flight risk be "proved"
  - and failure of vertical communication channels
    - Engineers concerns are not "heard" by management
      - A strong contrast to other safety oriented organizations
      - Fundamentally a failure of communication
  - In a culture that was, at least indirectly, devaluing safety
    - Shortages in safety personnel
    - Contractors responsible for the safety of their work
    - Allegiance to hierarchy and procedure replaces deference to engineering concerns
    - Proving lack of safety instead of proving safety
    - Antagonistic cultures of management and engineering
      - But with management in control

-- Last edited August 27, 2008

Go to Main Topic list

Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this page were written by participants on the Media Space Wiki, operated by Davis Foulger, and should be cited accordingly. For example (APA):
Foulger, D. and other participants. (August 27, 2008). Organizational Spr2006 Sess18. MediaSpaceWiki. Retrieved on from http://evolutionarymedia.com/wiki.htm?OrganizationalSpr2006Sess18.