“We’ve turned physicians into data entry clerks”
-Representative (Dr) Tom Price
Dr Price is President Trump’s nominee for the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. He expressed his frustration with Electronic Medical Records in his confirmation hearings.
More often than not technology causes increasing levels of frustration. Instead of solving problems or adding value by doing work they are hired to do, people become data monkeys entering field upon field of data in the hope of creating a data trail that will help the organization.
Anybody who has spent time with business hears a form of Dr Price’s complaint from lawyers, engineers, sales professionals or supervisors. On the other hand it is not unusual for managers to be blind to what is happening while drowning in oceans of data. Projects are way late right after everybody thought things were on track; production orders miss delivery and need last minute expediting; inventory is missing or in surplus despite the ability to see down to the SKU level at the last retail location; getting a fully loaded laptop to a new employee can take 1 month; company data is stolen all the time despite best efforts. What gives?
Technology has become an indispensable part of a modern organization. From systems that record transactions at the boundaries (purchasing, sales and payroll) or systems that allow tracking of work (work order tracking, project tracking or inventory tracking), all work in the organization is now visible to the managers in the organization. Is it helping managers make better decisions on where to focus? Is it helping identify bad actors or bad processes? Is this visibility helping reduce waste?
The assumption is that making things visible should do all of the above, and as a result create a more streamlined enterprise. The reality is more complex. Greater visibility creates overwhelming amounts of data. Also vast stores of transaction data inevitably have errors. People make mistakes, people forget to update, modeling of transactions is not exact, creating ambiguity in interpretation. It seems that the more transparency we want to create the more data police we need to deploy. Armies of project managers, analysts, industrial engineers, supervisors spend valuable time entering data into systems. Others spend time checking all this data. Sometimes it feels like there are 3 or 4 administrative roles for every person doing “real work”.
Which role in the organization is failing? Who deserves an “F” for all the angst and pain that technology is blamed for?
As Kevin Behr says, “CEO’s know that it hurts in IT”. I hear senior leaders saying that “IT has become the constraint in the organization. Any and all initiatives are blocked because it takes so long to deploy the associated IT.”
Any cost saving, any revenue enhancing or any quality improvement requires a large number of people to modify what they were doing. IT is the central nervous system, able to measure discrepancies between desired and actual. This makes it indispensable to making changes in the organization. If new processes, new rules or new measurements need to be deployed on a large scale they require “subordination” – this requires IT.
So managers request help from IT and all they hear is long delays, risk, technical jargon and promises that the next generation of systems may be able to help.
But let us look at the world from the IT perspective. They are bombarded with change requests and new capability requests. Often these requests are contradictory. The end users work around IT, installing home grown insecure databases and applications. Suddenly mission critical processes are dependent on band aid and tape. When these fail, is when people call IT for help. These islands of data make it impossible to provide a clear view into the organization. At times it feels like departments do not want to share data with each other so they go out of their way to keep themselves on an island. At the same time company leaders in the C-suites expect full integration, security and visibility. An impossible ask given the psychopathic and paranoid behavior of the users. IT cannot change this behavior. It ends up mirroring this distrust in the form of complexity in the data and applications.
IT feels it is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Unhappy end users and unhappy leaders. And as this complexity grows they have to continually keep up with the crazy growth in technology, in expectations of security, in the highest expectations of uptime and tightening SLAs on tickets and continuing pressure on budgets. An impossible ask. Only the most talented and politically skilled survive in these leadership roles.
So what is the way out? How can IT navigate this conflict between providing productivity and new ways of providing value while supporting a schizophrenic organization?
I think the answer is that this is not an IT problem. It is a management problem being reflected in the IT infrastructure. It is a problem in the culture of the organization. Driven by rules, measurements and processes that create fear, create uncertainty and create conflicts. Unless these root causes are addressed in the management of the organization, IT will reflect the chaos. It will be a mirror.
To change this culture requires a shift from the cost world to the throughput world to finding and leveraging the inherent simplicity and defining the rules, process and measurements around this. It requires organizations to know their “decisive competitive edge”. Know their constraint, know how to exploit this constraint and know what it means for the entire organization to be subordinated. Only then can IT reflect the unity of purpose in the organization with simplicity, speed, integration and visibility that provides “answers to the question asked” – true information.
Who can drive this change in the organization? I think the CIO role is poised to become the most strategic in the organization. A CIO with a deep understanding of technology and with an appreciation for “Inherent Simplicity” can and will be the key to helping companies simplify their management and achieve enormous success. Of course they will need to be hand in glove with the CEO, CFO and COO. But with their holistic view of the organization they can help catalyze a radical change in the culture of the organization. Positive, focused and secure in a competitive edge that others cannot even dream to emulate.
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