IT Infrastructures

IT INFRASTRUCTURES

Websites, portals, and other communication systems need iterative design. A tool may be used very differently from what its technical designers intended. But, in fact, the opposite can happen. For example, when the first “groupware” was introduced, companies invested in it seeking to boost collaboration. Often this intent was completely overwhelmed by established organizational cultures that were based on internal competition. My MIT colleague, Wanda Orlikowski, found that people in consulting firms that had installed Lotus Notes used it mostly to do things they had been doing all along, like sending e-mails and scheduling meetings, rather than sharing new client or technical information.4 In a culture where what I know determines my status and pay, it is naive to suppose that a new computer infrastructure will lead people to start collaborating. It is much more likely to be used in ways that reinforce the existing culture than in ways that change it.

Leadership in designing IT-based infrastructures starts with designing the composition of the team responsible for implementation. “When I led the SAP implementation for HP’s printing group,” says Anne Murray Allen, “80 percent of the team was from business—finance, procurement, manufacturing—and the entire team worked in one physical space. You couldn’t tell who was from IT or from the business. We were not installing a new tool. We were transforming the way we did work. Years later, when I took on the work of leading the HP employee portal intranet and knowledge management project, we approached the work the same way. The guiding strategy was to focus on how the technology could enable people throughout HP to find one another and to help one another—to build and expand knowledge networks across organizational boundaries. This was much more important than the technology itself.”

The same thinking needs to guide more novel learning infrastructures, like microworlds. When I originally wrote this book, I envisioned these simulated learning environments as a key learning infrastructure for the future, and boldly proclaimed them “the technology of the learning organization” in the chapter subtitle. Although simulation has become much more common in the intervening years, my hopes for the impact of microworlds have not yet been realized. The culprit, I believe, is too much emphasis on the technology (simulation models in this case) and too little on a patient iterative design process that focuses on real learning and change.

“I think the idea of microworlds as laid out in The Fifth Discipline was ahead of its time,” says Ford’s Jeremy Seligman, a senior member of Marv Adams’s staff. “But the pervasiveness of computers and increasing advances in computing power are starting to make the difference. We are seeing more and more instances of management flight simulators and microworlds as meaningful drivers of business strategy development and decision making.” One Ford plant manager has taken more than one thousand employees through a plant floor/manufacturing flight simulator that lets people at all levels of the manufacturing process experience possible scenarios and outcomes before they happen, making them more adaptive, and certainly more understanding of the whole system of which they are a part. “This led to significant increases in productivity on the plant floor, and I expect to see similar projects in other plants,” says Seligman. “We’ve also had success in sales planning. One microworld that transformed the thinking of a leadership team in a very large regional business changed sales plans, metrics, and core strategic assumptions. This is such a step ahead of endless conference room marathons based on insufficient data and unarticulated views of possible futures.

“You have to be patient and keep looking for where and how to engage people with their real needs. The design paradigm is evolving rapidly. Gradually, I think we are getting to a more refined view of the critical success factors for implementing microworlds in organizational contexts.” Seligman and Adams’s continuing experimentation and refinement are based on a deep conviction that, as Seligman says, “as we learn how to embed these sorts of learning tools in work settings, hold a critical difference between survival and extinction for companies in the current hypercompetitive marketplace.”