Boardroom IT Clinic
Boardroom IT Clinic is a column in the
Financial Times IT Review supplement, which focuses on addressing IT issues
faced by business leaders. This short article, written by Auridian’s MD and
founder, Ade
McCormack, appeared in the 14th February edition.
"How
can I squeeze more value out of my people?"
People can be a problem, what with their aspirations,
variable output and occasionally conflicting agendas. They are generally best
avoided or at worst used sparingly, particularly where the business is run as a
‘sausage machine’. This philosophy served the industrial era well.
But of course many businesses today are not sausage
machines; practically all the value is embedded in their people. The question
here is how to ‘sweat these assets’. Traditional approaches to improving
productivity have been carbon-based, typically a stick or a carrot. But with
the inexorable downward pressure on margins, businesses need to do more than
just jettisoning ‘dead wood’ and keeping staff motivated to remain profitable.
Fighter pilots perhaps provide a vision of ‘next generation’
staff productivity. Very task driven and very in tune with their environment.
They work in teams with near seamless communications. Most importantly their
ratio of ‘productivity’ to labour cost is very high.
Like fighter pilots, your staff need to work as teams and be
sensitive to external conditions. But as usual, the bigger the organization the
more difficult it is to be a team player. Geographical boundaries and product
fiefdoms create obstacles. A history of acquisitions gives rise to a patchwork
of technologies and cultures, which all contribute to sub-optimal group
productivity. Many of the biggest companies in the world are not truly
‘punching their weight’ because they do not have the tools in place for their
people to ‘hunt as a pack’. Global companies often repeat their mistakes across
the planet because of a lack of knowledge sharing across the business. This is
costly.
So what can businesses do?
Step 1 – Ensure staff are connected to the market.
Staff that are hermetically sealed from the business
environment are unlikely to adjust their behaviour to changing market
conditions. Head-up displays would be an extreme. Access to customer details
and digested market intelligence would be a base line.
Step 2 – Enable people to communicate.
Reduce the number of intranets in the organization to one.
Ensure everyone has email and phone access to everyone else. Set up an online
directory that enables staff to establish who the experts are within the
business. This will reduce time to knowledge and wheel reinvention.
Step 3 – Incentivise people to share
Sales people are not going to update the customer database
with valuable intelligence that will then be exploited by another department
serving the same customer, if they do not get a piece of the action. Some staff
view sister departments as the enemy. This is a cultural issue and is at the
root of many under-performing companies. Sadly the problem is deemed to be
technology related and the IT department gets the blame.
The idea of leveraging one’s intellectual capital by the
aforementioned steps is very much associated with the term knowledge management
(KM). A number of industry analysts would have you believe that KM has had its
day. I agree that KM as a technology solution has failed to deliver. But KM
technology, coupled with cultural change, and enhanced market intelligence has
yet to be fully explored. Surprise your union officials by expressing your
desire to migrate the staff to a Strike-Force culture.
Ade
McCormack
