Culture x Technology=Success
One of my clients is making a significant investment in an organization-wide, state-of-the-art information technology (i.t.) system. In today’s digital environment, making that sort of investments is essential, especially for matters like cost- and operational- efficiencies. But if you want to get the biggest bang for your bucks when it comes to i.t., keep in mind three little tidbits:
1. Information technology should make your organization significantly faster, more transparent, more “boundariless”, and more empowering by providing everyone with the real-time fluid access to any information and to anyone. But if your corporate culture is marked by secrecy and information hoarding, by behind-closed-doors power plays, and by command-and-control decision-making, then your investment will run right into a wall. Technology won’t fix your culture; on the contrary, your culture will smother the impact of your technology. So you’d better work really hard on making your corporate culture compatible and supportive of the technology you’re installing.
2. Make sure everybody knows that the new systems are not peripheral to people’s work; they become the work. People need to understand that the new information technology is meant to literally change the way they do their daily activities and make their daily decisions. If employees do their work the way they always have but use the technology as a periodic add-on, the payoff of the technology plummets. I was recently in a corporation that had made a sizable investment in a huge, extensive intranet, but only a small minority of managers and employees were using it with any regularity. What a waste. So make sure that your technology installments are accompanied by heaps of training, development, performance expectations and process overhaul.
3. To insure good execution, double check that your internal i.t. function or “department” is viewed by other managers and employees not as a bureaucracy but as a support system. I’ve been in organizations where the internal i.t. group is seen as slow, rigid, and self-absorbed rather than as a service function that exists for the benefit of everyone else on the payroll. Your i.t. group needs to be composed of individuals with cutting-edge expertise, a thorough understanding of the interplay between i.t. and the corporation’s strategy, and, finally, a strong belief that their role is to make other peoples’ work easier and more value-adding.
Points #1, 2, and 3 above raise some important questions regarding the interplay of technology and culture. Those interplays are multiplicative in impact. Notice that the title of this blog is multiplicative. It’s not an additive Culture + Technology, it’s a multiplicative Culture x Technology. That’s very important, because if it was an additive equation, an organization could succeed by being great on one factor (like tech) and mediocre on the other (like culture); after all, you’re just adding. But you can’t do that with a multiplicative function, because no matter how huge one factor is, if the other factor is zero, the whole equation collapses. On the positive side, if the factors are both healthy, the multiplicative payoff is a lot higher than an additive one (for example, 6 x 6 is a lot bigger than 6 + 6).
Forgive the mathematical play. All I’m trying to say is that i.t. can’t stand alone. Information technology is only as strong as the corporate culture it’s in. It’s when leaders focus on embedding great technologies into great, compatible cultures that great successes occur.
1. Information technology should make your organization significantly faster, more transparent, more “boundariless”, and more empowering by providing everyone with the real-time fluid access to any information and to anyone. But if your corporate culture is marked by secrecy and information hoarding, by behind-closed-doors power plays, and by command-and-control decision-making, then your investment will run right into a wall. Technology won’t fix your culture; on the contrary, your culture will smother the impact of your technology. So you’d better work really hard on making your corporate culture compatible and supportive of the technology you’re installing.
2. Make sure everybody knows that the new systems are not peripheral to people’s work; they become the work. People need to understand that the new information technology is meant to literally change the way they do their daily activities and make their daily decisions. If employees do their work the way they always have but use the technology as a periodic add-on, the payoff of the technology plummets. I was recently in a corporation that had made a sizable investment in a huge, extensive intranet, but only a small minority of managers and employees were using it with any regularity. What a waste. So make sure that your technology installments are accompanied by heaps of training, development, performance expectations and process overhaul.
3. To insure good execution, double check that your internal i.t. function or “department” is viewed by other managers and employees not as a bureaucracy but as a support system. I’ve been in organizations where the internal i.t. group is seen as slow, rigid, and self-absorbed rather than as a service function that exists for the benefit of everyone else on the payroll. Your i.t. group needs to be composed of individuals with cutting-edge expertise, a thorough understanding of the interplay between i.t. and the corporation’s strategy, and, finally, a strong belief that their role is to make other peoples’ work easier and more value-adding.
Points #1, 2, and 3 above raise some important questions regarding the interplay of technology and culture. Those interplays are multiplicative in impact. Notice that the title of this blog is multiplicative. It’s not an additive Culture + Technology, it’s a multiplicative Culture x Technology. That’s very important, because if it was an additive equation, an organization could succeed by being great on one factor (like tech) and mediocre on the other (like culture); after all, you’re just adding. But you can’t do that with a multiplicative function, because no matter how huge one factor is, if the other factor is zero, the whole equation collapses. On the positive side, if the factors are both healthy, the multiplicative payoff is a lot higher than an additive one (for example, 6 x 6 is a lot bigger than 6 + 6).
Forgive the mathematical play. All I’m trying to say is that i.t. can’t stand alone. Information technology is only as strong as the corporate culture it’s in. It’s when leaders focus on embedding great technologies into great, compatible cultures that great successes occur.
posted by Oren Harari at 7:49 PM
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