Archive for the ‘Paper Review’ Category
On the politics of enterprise software implementation
Introduction
Project managers who have worked on enterprise system projects will know that the hardest problems to resolve are political rather than technical. Moreover, although such stories abound they remain largely untold, perhaps because those who have lived these stories are not free to speak about them. Even case studies in academic journals tend to gloss over political issues perhaps out fear of offending their hosts. Consequently there are not very many detailed case studies that focus on the politics of enterprise software customisation / implementation. In this post I summarise a paper by Christopher Bull entitled, Politics in Packaged Software Implementation, which describes a case study that highlights the complex and messy political issues that can arise in such projects.
Background
Given that IT tends to attract people with a analytical bent of mind, it is not surprising that those who plan enterprise scale system implementations focus on technical issues rather than politics. On the other hand, there is fairly rich research literature on the politics of system implementation.
In the paper, the author presents a short, selective review of the literature. The main point he makes is that the implementation of information systems is political because such systems are catalysts for organizational change. Some stakeholders may perceive benefits from certain changes whereas others will not. Given this, it is likely that the former group will be advocates for the system whereas the latter will not. Accordingly each side will present arguments that support their stance and these arguments will necessarily have a social/political dimension. That is, they are about more than just the technology.
A common way in which political behaviour manifests itself is as a resistance to the proposed changes. The author mentions that there are three theories of resistance, one each for origin / cause of resistance
- People-determined – in which resistance arises from a fear of change that is inherent in the human psyche.
- System-determined – wherein the change is resisted because the system is perceived as deficient or not useful.
- Interaction – where the system is seen as forcing a change in the culture and norms of the organisation. This is particularly the case for enterprise systems which tend to impose uniform work processes that are driven by the head office of an organisation, often to the detriment of efficiency in regional offices and subsidiaries.
Information systems academics tend to borrow heavily from other areas of the social sciences. It is therefore no surprise that there have been attempts to view the social aspects of information systems through the lens of Marxist theory. The parallels are obvious. Firstly, there are several different classes of people – management, developers and users – each with their own interests. Secondly, there are obvious inequalities in the distribution of influence and status between these groups. Case studies partially support Marxist theory – but I reckon this will not be a surprise to most readers.
The author points out that there are many different theories that can be used to make sense of social and political issues in information systems implementation. However, most of these tend to focus on one or another factor, overlooking others. In real life, political issues arise from diverse causes some of which may even counteract each other! The true value of focusing on the political aspects of system implementation is to gain an understanding of the causes of conflict and thereby develop techniques to alleviate them. It is here that case studies can be particularly useful because they allow researchers to study issues as they develop and thus developing an understanding of why they are happening and what could have been done to prevent them.
The case study
The study was carried out in a midsize, UK-based manufacturing company. The author noted the organisation had a hierarchical management structure with work organized by department. Interestingly, although management believed that communication between departments was good, other employees did not necessarily agree. Nevertheless, staff members were loyal and the company had a very low employee turnover rate.
The company was facing increasing pressure from competitors and had recently lost some key accounts. Management realised the organisation would need to become more proactive and responsive to customer needs, and this realization prompted the decision to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
The first decision that needed to be made was whether to build or buy – i.e whether the system should be built in-house or purchased. This decision has a political dimension as organisations often go down the “buy route” when they want to reduce the influence of their internal IT departments. However, building a CRM system is a huge undertaking and the IT department did not really want to be doing this. So the decision to buy rather than build proved to be popular with both IT and business staff.
Although the decision to buy the system was not contentious, the process of implementation turned out to be messier than either party had foreseen. Some of the problems mentioned by the author include:
- The project team (which was appointed by senior management) was widely thought to be unrepresentative. Groups that were not represented felt that their concerns would be ignored. Moreover, some felt genuinely threatened. For example, external sales staff (who were not included in the team or in project planning) felt that the system was intended to replace their roles.
- The steering committee was jointly headed by the IT and sales managers. This caused friction – the sales manager thought it undermined his authority whereas the IT manager viewed it as an unnecessary imposition on his time.
- Different departments had different views of what the system should do based on their respective departmental interests. Since it was difficult to achieve consensus, management engaged external consultants to assist the project team in requirements gathering and system sourcing/implementation.
- The consultants and IT had an adversarial relationship from the start. IT believed the consultants were biased towards a particular CRM product. There was also significant disagreement about priorities.
- Senior management appeared to trust the consultants more than the (internal) team members. This caused a degree of resentment and unease within the project team.
- Groups well represented on the steering committee (internal sales, in particular) were able to have say in how the system should work. Consequently, other groups felt that their concerns were not adequately addressed.
As a result of the above:
- Those who felt that their concerns were not addressed adequately indulged in delaying tactics.
- The project created a rift between employee groups had been homogenous in prior times. For example factions formed within the Sales Department, based on perceptions that certain groups (internal staff) would be better off after the system was implemented.
Moreover, effective use of the software entailed significant changes in existing work practices. Unsurprisingly, most of these changes were viewed negatively by employees. Quoting from the paper:
…new working practices were contentious because they were perceived to be unreasonable and unrealistic, particularly the scheduling and allocating of work for others. There were also complaints by certain sales staff that individuals who managed tasks at the beginning of the business chain would benefit considerably from those employed elsewhere because they were unaffected by internal organisational bottlenecks. Finally, the increasing number of surveillance features contained within the packaged system was resented by many sales support staff because of the pressures arising out of the increasing ability for managers to monitor and judge individual performance.
It is clear from the author’s description of the case study that those responsible for the project had not foreseen the political fallout of implementing the new system.
Lessons learned
I suspect the lessons the author draws from the case study will be depressingly familiar to many folks who have lived through a packaged software implementation. The main points made include:
- Senior management failed to consider the effect that the existing political tensions within the organisation would have on the project.
- There was no prior analysis of potential areas of concern that front line employees may have.
- There was a failure to recognize that the composition of a project steering committee will have political implications. Groups under-represented on the committee will almost always be resentful.
In short: new systems will almost always reconfigure relationships between different stakeholder groups. These reconfigurations will have political implications which need to be addressed as a part of the project.
Summing up
The paper details an interesting case study on the political effects of packaged software implementation, and although the paper was written well over a decade ago, many of the observations made in it are still very relevant today. I suspect many readers will find that author’s analysis and conclusions resonate with their own experiences.
The take-home lesson in a line is as follows: those implementing a packaged software system would do well to pay attention to existing relationships between different stakeholder groups and understand how these might be affected by the new system.
The illusion of enterprise risk management – a paper review
Introduction
Enterprise risk management (ERM) refers to the process by which uncertainties are identified, analysed and managed from an organization-wide perspective. In principle such a perspective enables organisations to deal with risks in a holistic manner, avoiding the silo mentality that plagues much of risk management practice. This is the claim made of ERM at any rate, and most practitioners accept it as such. However, whether the claim really holds is another matter altogether. Unfortunately, most of the available critiques of ERM are written for academics or risk management experts. In this post I summarise a critique of ERM presented in a paper by Michael Power entitled, The Risk Management of Nothing.
I’ll begin with a brief overview of ERM frameworks and then summarise the main points of the paper along with some of my comments and annotations.
ERM Frameworks and Definitions
What is ERM?
The best way to answer this question is to look at a couple of well-known ERM frameworks, one from the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) and the other from the Committee of Sponsoring Organisations of the Treadway Commission (COSO).
CAS defines ERM as:
… the discipline by which an organization in any industry assesses, controls, exploits, finances, and monitors risks from all sources for the purpose of increasing the organization’s short- and long-term value to its stakeholders.
See this article for an overview of ERM from actuarial perspective.
COSO defines ERM as:
…a process, effected by an entity’s board of directors, management and other personnel, applied in strategy setting and across the enterprise, designed to identify potential events that may affect the entity, and manage risk to be within its risk appetite, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of entity objectives.
The term risk appetite in the above definition refers to the risk an organisation is willing to bear. See the first article in the June 2003 issue of Internal Auditor for more on the COSO perspective on ERM.
In both frameworks, the focus is very much on quantifying risks through (primarily) financial measures and on establishing accountability for managing these risks in a systematic way.
All this sounds very sensible and uncontroversial. So, where’s the problem?
The problems with ERM
The author of the paper begins with the observation that the basic aim of ERM is to identify risks that can affect an organisation’s objectives and then design controls and mitigation strategies that reduce these risks (collectively) to below a predetermined value that is specified by the organisation’s risk appetite. Operationally, identified risks are monitored and corrective action is taken when they go beyond limits specified by the controls, much like the operation of a thermostat.
In this view, risk management is a mechanistic process. Failures of risk management are seen more as being due to “not doing it right” (implementation failure) or politics getting in the way (organizational friction), rather than a problem with the framework itself. The basic design of the framework is rarely questioned.
Contrary to common wisdom, the author of the paper believes that the design of ERM is flawed in the following three ways:
- The idea of a single, organisation-wide risk appetite is simplistic.
- The assumption that risk can be dealt with by detailed, process-based rules (suitable for audit and control) is questionable.
- The undue focus on developing financial metrics and controls blind it to “bigger picture”, interconnected risks because these cannot be quantified or controlled by such mechanisms.
We’ll now take a look at each of the above in some detail
Appetite vs. appetisation
As mentioned earlier, risk appetite is defined as the risk the organisation is willing to bear. Although ERM frameworks allow for qualitative measures of risk appetite, most organisations implementing ERM tend to prefer quantitative ones. This is a problem because the definition of risk appetite can vary significantly across an organization. For example, the sales and audit functions within an organisation could (will!) have different appetites for risk. As another example, familiar to anyone who reads the news, is that there is usually a big significant gap between the risk appetites of financial institutions and regulatory authorities.
The difference in risk appetites of different stakeholder groups is a manifestation of the fact that risk is a social construct – different stakeholder groups view a given risk in different ways, and some may not even see certain risks as risks (witness the behaviour of certain financial “masters of the universe”)
Since a single, organisation-wide risk appetite is difficult to come up with, the author suggests a different approach – one which takes into account the multiplicity of viewpoints in an organisation; a process he calls “risk appetizing”. This involves getting diverse stakeholders to achieve a consensus / agreement on what constitutes risk appetite. Power argues that this process of reconciling different viewpoints of risk would lead to a more realistic view of the risk the organization is willing to bear. Quoting from the paper:
Conceptualising risk appetising as a process might better direct risk management attention to where it has likely been lacking, namely to the multiplicity of interactions which shape operational and ethical boundaries at the level of organizational practice. COSO-style ERM principles effectively limit the concept of risk appetite within a capital measurement discourse. Framing risk appetite as the process through which ethics and incentives are formed and reformed would not exclude this technical conception, but would bring it closer to the insights of several decades of organization theory.
Explicitly acknowledging the diversity of viewpoints on risk is likely to be closer to reality because:
…a conflictual and pluralistic model is more descriptive of how organizations actually work, and makes lower demands on organizational and political rationality to produce a single ‘appetite’ by explicitly recognising and institutionalising processes by which different appetites and values can be mediated.
Such a process is difficult because it involves getting people who have different viewpoints to agree on what constitutes a sensible definition of risk appetite.
A process bias
A bigger problem, in Power’s view, is that the ERM frameworks overemphasise financial / accounting measures and processes as a means of quantifying and controlling risk. As he puts it ERM:
… is fundamentally an accounting-driven blueprint which emphasises a controls-based approach to risk management. This design emphasis means that efforts at implementation will have an inherent tendency to elaborate detailed controls with corresponding documents trails.
This is a problem because it leads to a “rule-based compliance” mentality wherein risks are managed in a mechanical manner, using bureaucratic processes as a substitute for real thought about risks and how they should be managed. Such a process may work in a make-believe world where all risks are known, but is unlikely to work in one in which there is a great deal of ambiguity.
Power makes the important point that rule-based compliance chews up organizational resources. The tangible effort expended on compliance serves to reassure organizations that they are doing something to manage risks. This is dangerous because it lulls them into a false sense of security:
Rule-based compliance lays down regulations to be met, and requires extensive evidence, audit trails and box ‘checking’. All this demands considerable work and there is daily pressure on operational staff to process regulatory requirements. Yet, despite the workload volume pressure, this is also a cognitively comfortable world which focuses inwards on routine systems and controls. The auditability of this controls architecture can be theorized as a defence against anxiety and enables organizational agents to feel that their work conforms to legitimised principles.
In this comfortable, prescriptive world of process-based risk management, there is little time to imagine and explore what (else) could go wrong. Further, the latter is often avoided because it is a difficult and often uncomfortable process:
…the imagination of alternative futures is likely to involve the production of discomfort, as compared with formal ‘comfort’ of auditing. The approach can take the form of scenario analysis in which participants from different disciplines in an organization can collectively track the trajectory of potential decisions and events. The process begins as an ‘encounter’ with risk and leads to the confrontation of limitation and ambiguity.
Such a process necessarily involves debate and dialogue – it is essentially a deliberative process. And as Power puts it:
The challenge is to expand processes which support interaction and dialogue and de-emphasise due process – both within risk management practice and between regulator and regulated.
This is right of course, but that’s not all: a lot of other process-focused disciplines such as project management would also benefit by acknowledging and responding to this challenge.
A limited view of embeddedness
One of the imperatives of ERM is to “embed” risk management within organisations. Among other things, this entails incorporating risk management explicitly into job descriptions, and making senior managers responsible for managing risks. Although this is a step in the right direction, Power argues that the concept of embeddeness as articulated in ERM remains limited because it focuses on specific business entities, ignoring the wider environment and context in which they exist. The essential (but not always obvious) connections between entities are not necessarily accounted for. As Power puts it:
ERM systems cannot represent embeddedness in the sense of interconnectedness; its proponents seem only to demand an intensification of embedding at the individual entity level. Yet, this latter kind of embedding of a compliance driven risk management, epitomised by the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, is arguably a disaster in itself, by tying up resources and, much worse, cognition and attention in ‘auditized’ representations of business processes.
In short: the focus on following a process-oriented approach to risk management – as mandated by frameworks – has the potential to de-focus attention from risks that are less obvious, but are potentially more significant.
Addressing the limitations
Power believes the flaws in ERM can be addressed by looking to the practice of business continuity management (BCM). BCM addresses the issue of disaster management – i.e. how to keep an organisation functioning in the event of a disaster. Consequently, there is a significant overlap between the aims of BCM and ERM. However, unlike ERM, BCM draws specialists from different fields and emphasizes collective action. Such an approach is therefore more likely to take a holistic view of risk, and that is the real point.
Regardless of the approach one takes, the point is to involve diverse stakeholders and work towards a shared (enterprise-wide) understanding of risks. Only then will it be possible to develop a risk management plan that incorporates the varying, even contradictory, perspectives that exist within an organisation. There are many techniques to work towards a shared understanding of risks, or any other issues for that matter. Some of these are discussed at length in my book.
Conclusion
Power suggests that ERM, as articulated by bodies such as CAS and COSO, flawed because:
- It attempts to quantify risk appetite at the organizational level – an essentially impossible task because different organizational stakeholders will have different views of risk. Risk is a social construct.
- It advocates a controls and rule-based approach to managing risks. Such a prescriptive “best” practice approach discourages debate and dialogue about risks. Consequently, many viewpoints are missed and quite possibly, so are many risks.
- Despite the rhetoric of ERM, implemented risk management controls and processes often overlook connections and dependencies between entities within organisations. So, although risk management appears to be embedded within the organisation, in reality it may not be so.
Power suggests that ERM practice could learn a few lessons from Business Continuity Management (BCM), in particular about the interconnected nature of business risks and the collective action needed to tackle them. Indeed, any approach that attempts to reconcile diverse risk viewpoints will be a huge improvement on current practice. Until then ERM will continue to be an illusion, offering false comfort to those who are responsible for managing risk.
On the nonlinearity of organisational phenomena
Introduction
Some time ago I wrote a post entitled, Models and Messes – from best practices to appropriate practices, in which I described the deep connection between the natural sciences and 20th century management. In particular, I discussed how early management theorists took inspiration from physics. Quoting from that post:
Given the spectacular success of mathematical modeling in the physical and natural sciences, it is perhaps unsurprising that early management theorists attempted to follow the same approach. Fredrick Taylor stated this point of view quite clearly in the introduction to his classic monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management…Taylor’s intent was to prove that management could be reduced to a set of principles that govern all aspects of work in organizations.
In Taylor’s own words, his goal was to “prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all human activities…”
In the earlier post I discussed how organisational problems elude so-called scientific solutions because they are ambiguous and have a human dimension. Now I continue the thread, introducing a concept from physics that has permeated much of management thinking, much to the detriment of managerial research and practice. The concept is that of linearity. Simply put, linearity is a mathematical expression of the idea that complex systems can be analysed in terms of their (simpler) components. I explain this notion in more detail in the following sections.
The post is organised as follows: I begin with a brief introduction to linearity in physics and then describe its social science equivalent. Following this, I discuss a paper that points out some pitfalls of linear thinking in organisational research and (by extrapolation) to management practice.
Linearity in physics and mathematics
A simplifying assumption underlying much of classical physics is that of equilibrium or stability. A characteristic of a system in equilibrium is that it tends to resist change. Specifically, if such a system is disturbed, it tends to return to its original state. Of course, physics also deals with systems that are not in equilibrium – the weather, or a spacecraft on its way to Mars are examples of such systems. In general, non-equilibrium systems are described by more complex mathematical models than equilibrium systems.
Now, complex mathematical models – such as those describing the dynamics of weather or even the turbulent flow of water- can only be solved numerically using computers. The key complicating factor in such models is that they consist of many interdependent variables that are combined in complex ways. 19th and early 20th century physicists who had no access to computers had to resort to some tricks in order to make the mathematics of such systems tractable. One of the most common simplifying tricks was to treat the system as being linear. Linear systems have mathematical properties that roughly translate to the following in physical terms:
- Cause is proportional effect (or output is proportional to input). This property is called homogeneity.
- Any complex effect can be expressed as a sum of a well defined number of simpler effects. This property is often referred to as additivity, but I prefer the term decomposability. This notion of decomposability is also called the principle of superposition.
In contrast, real-life systems (such as the weather) tend to be described by mathematical equations that do not satisfy the above conditions. Such systems are called nonlinear.
Linear systems are well-understood, predictable and frankly, a bit boring – they hold no surprises and cannot display novel behaviour. The evolution of linear systems is constrained by the equations and initial conditions (where they start from). Once these are known, their future state is completely determined. Linear systems cannot display the range of behaviours that are typical of complex systems. Consequently, when a complex system is converted into a linear one by simplifying the mathematical model, much of the interesting behaviour of the system is lost.
Linearity in organisational theories
It turns out that many organizational theories are based on assumptions of equilibrium (i.e. that organisations are stable) and linearity (i.e. that the socio-economic forces on the organisation are small) . Much like the case of physical systems, such models will predict only small changes about the stable state – i.e. that “business as usual” will continue indefinitely. In a paper published in 1988, Andrew Abbott coined the term General Linear Reality (GLR) to describe this view of reality. GLR is based on the following assumptions:
- The world consists of unchanging entities which have variable attributes (eg: a fixed organisation with a varying number of employees)
- Small changes to attributes can have only small effects, and effects are manifested as changes to existing attributes.
- A given attribute can have only one causal effect – i.e. a single cause has a single effect.
- The sequence of events has no effect on the outcome.
- Entities and attributes are independent of each other (i.e. no correlation)
The connection between GLR and linearity in physics is quite evident in these assumptions.
The world isn’t linear
But reality isn’t linear – it is very non-linear as many managers learn the hard way. The problem is that the tools they are taught in management schools do not equip them to deal with situations that have changing entities due to feedback effects and disproportionately large effects from small causes (to mention just a couple of common non-linear effects).
Nevertheless, management research is catching up with reality. For example, in a paper entitled Organizing Far From Equilibriium: Nonlinear changes in organizational fields, Allan Meyer, Vibha Gaba and Kenneth Collwell highlight limitations of the GLR paradigm. The paper describes three research projects that were aimed at studying how large organisations adapt to change. Typically when researchers plan such studies, they tacitly make GLR assumptions regarding cause-effect, independence etc. In the words of Meyer, Gaba and Collwell:
In accord with the canons of general linear reality, as graduate students each of us learned to partition the research process into sequential stages: conceptualizing, designing, observing, analyzing, and reporting. During the conceptual and design stages, researchers are enjoined to make choices that will remain in effect throughout the inquiry. They are directed, for instance, to identify theoretical models, select units and levels of analysis, specify dependent and independent variables, choose sampling frames, and so forth. During the subsequent stages of observation, analysis, and reporting, these parameters are immutable. To change them on the fly could contaminate data or be interpreted as scientific fraud. Stigma attached to “post hoc theorizing,” “data mining” and “dust-bowl empiricism” are handed down from one generation of GLR researchers to the next.
Whilst the studies were in progress, however, each of the organisations that they were studying underwent large, unanticipated changes: in one case employees went on mass strike; in another, the government changed regulations regarding competition; and in the third boom-bust cycles caused massive changes in the business environment. The important point is that these changes invalidated GLR assumptions completely. When such “game-changing” forces are in play, it is all but impossible to define a sensible equilibrium state to which organisations can adapt.
In the last two decades, there is a growing body of research which shows that organizations are complex systems that display emergent behaviour. Mainstream management practice is yet to catch up with these new developments, but the signs are good: in the last few years there have been articles dealing with some of these issues in management journals which often grace the bookshelves of CEOs and senior executives.
To conclude
Mainstream management principles are based on a linear view of reality, a view that is inspired by scientific management and 19th century physics. In reality, however, organisations evolve in ways that are substantially different from those implied by simplistic cause-effect relationships embodied in linear models. The sciences have moved on, recognizing that most real-world phenomena are nonlinear, but much of organisational research and management practice remains mired in a linear world. In view of this it isn’t surprising that many management “best” practices taught in business schools don’t work in the real world.
Related posts:
Models and messes – from best practices to appropriate practices
Eight to Late 