It's the Culture, Stupid

That's my reading of R. Todd Stephens recent post on the (in)effective implementation of collaborative applications such as corporate blogs:

Failure [of these collaborative applications] will be related to the infrastructure. More specifically, the capacity and performance of the application will dictate the failure. Assuming the system selected has the basic business functions required, failure will occur when the system destroys the trust by not excelling in the operations and infrastructure areas. However, successful applications built over a solid infrastructure does not guarantee success. In fact, a solid infrastructure is only important when the need is not fulfilled.

Success is much more related to the client support and the business community acceptance of the technology. Therefore success in collaboration is related to the training, engagement processes, branding, best practices, user manuals, communities of practice, communications, and providing customer service.

So where does the vast majority of funding in this area go toward? You guessed it, the software, hardware, vendor relationships, capacity, etc. More importantly try to find a best practice document, vendor user guide, or a research firm review of the implementation of collaborative applications, you will find a rather large vacuum. Our community is obviously more concerned with collaborative failure than collaborative success.

I see two overlapping failures that contribute to this massive vacuum Todd so rightly recognizes.  First, there's a general bias in favor of the tangible and the visible over the abstract.  People will devote much more time and energy weighing the pros and cons of various software packages than they will considering the organizational culture that will ultimately determine whether said software succeeds or fails.  Considering that an organization's culture is the full expression of its history, its leadership, and every dollar spent on personnel, and that even the most expensive technology is a trifling toy in comparison, this failure says a lot about our shortsightedness.

Second, speaking specifically about blogging tools, these applications are so easy to implement and use that it's hard not to take a "Shoot first, ask questions later" approach.  The temptation to just get a blog up and running is understandable--everybody else is doing it, and management is breathing down our neck wondering why we're not, so let's just get going.  As a result, our understanding of these tools and their impact on an organization's culture lags far behind their actual use.  Todd's looking for a set of engagement processes, best practices, user manuals and communities of practice related to these tools.  I see some great resources growing organically, and I see some absolute garbage being hyped by get-rich-quick blogging "experts," but I don't really see what Todd's looking for, because I don't think it exists yet.  Now that gives me some ideas...

organizational culture

Comments

[David Geilhufe]

This could as easily be read as a critique of nonprofit technology initiatives. Most of the investment is in the software not in the people using the software, which is the fare more important component.

[Ed]

I think that's a common mistake the whole world 'round, in the nonprofit sector and every other industry as well.

[John McCann]

Gday Ed, I'm more interested in this as a direction forward for those with imagination, than a critique of where most organisations are currently 'stuck'. I am wrestling with the concepts of 'seeding' creativity, imagination and initiative in organisations. My ambition is to turn a 100% transaction factory into a 95% transaction factory/5% ideas factory. (sadly this is a 'wild' rather than a 'modest' ambition) The rationalle is that there is a trend to 'cluster'or centralise processing of back-end government business, but if these clusters don't contain, or foster, an inovative culture, they'll become increasing 'unfunctional' and have no capacity to 'change with the times'

After a while wrestling with the 'powers' a fella arrives at exactly the point you describe, where you can not sell either a system, nor a 'new attitude' to management, and you cast around for another way of transforming the organisation. Of course sometimes it's a mercy just to let them (organisations) die from their own increasing irrelevance, but some of them take a lot of killing, and make life pretty miserable for the workers on the inside while the fatally damaged organisation stumbles around, neither living nor dead.

My sense of it is that there's something in that 'organic' 'seeding' concept. I have a concept of creating a capacity to store and share (and build upon) ideas that might have to (initially) live 'outside' the organisation, which would engage those people inside the organisation who still had some life left in them (and something to contribute but nowhere to put it), and consider how that might 'grow' 'from the outside in' (and be a link between the creative fragments on the 'inside' and some powerful creative institutions (be it a university or a gamers forum) on the 'outside') . But that's one of a range of options, and maybe the best approach is also organic - plant many seeds in many different locations and soils, and some might just take root.

[Ed]

To paraphrase John, "Some organizations take a lot of killing." Now that's a tagline for a change management consultant!

John, I wonder if you're describing a (hypothetical, I hope) situation where you've led the organization to water, but there's just no way you gonna get them to drink:

You've set the bar for innovation fairly low (i.e. 5% of the organization's effort devoted to new ideas is a "wild" ambition), you've been forced to establish creative outposts beyond the organization's formal boundaries (whose innovations will presumably be received like flaming tarballs catapulted over the parapets), and yet the fundamental purpose of the initiative isn't to advance the organization's goals but to alleviate the suffering of the people trapped inside.

I admire a quixotic quest as much as the next guy, but you gotta admit that sometimes you just have to admit defeat, fire the client, return the fee and walk away.

Great blog, by the way. Good stuff.