Transparency, Change and Equality

I spent the last month or so meticulously planning my next bajillion blogs in a very structured manner and along the way realized that blogging should be a little more spontaneous otherwise I should just write a book. So I will be a little more random in the order of topics that I write about but they will still relate to my original premise. The power of information.

Many years ago a large fraction of people were paid or evaluated by piece work. You may have spent the day picking apples in an orchard and at the end of the day you received your pay based on the number of apples you picked. The harder you worked, the more you achieved. Our corporate world lost the ability to see into the labour of the individuals executing its business processes. In recent years the introducion of technology and workflow systems creates visbility.

If your objective is to improve your business processes then you must be able to measure the process at a granular level. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. If people are involved in the execution of a process then you need to be able to measure their productivity. Creating information systems that promote the execution of a particular workflow, track it at all levels and measure the result are key. Many such workflow systems exist, ERP systems, Sales Forces automation, etc. Management should know which sales person is making more cold calls than the next, they should know which programmer generates less lines of code than the average ... you get the idea. This is transparency, the ability to see a business process at work at all levels.

Whenever I have worked with clients to try to improve their business processes by providing intelligence based on careful analysis of the data created by the processes I have run into significant change management issues. We know that change is not easy, there is a whole branch 0f consulting dedicated to change management. Transparency, however, creates its own change issues. Creating information about a process, creates transparency and therefore creates accountability (i.e. if every one knew you did half the work of the person next to you, you might be held accountable in some fashion. Your peers might ostracize you, management might dock your pay or at least pass you over for raises etc. )People do not like to be measured in a transparent fashion because it forces them to be accountable on a daily basis for results or contribution delivered. In my experience, the biggest barrier to leveraging the power of information is the willingness to act. If a company wants to improve a business process it needs to "Just do it". There is no barrier to change, never has been, never will be. The fear of transparency is, I believe, a major barrier to information based business process improvement.

One way to reduce the fear associated with transparency and hence reduce the barriers to change is to level the playing field or create equality around certain information. We know that in a transaction or negotiation the party who has better information has a distinct advantage. Corporate systems are typically set up so that management has access to information that employees do not. When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of an employee's contribution to a business process we should include the contribution of all levels of management to that process. Perhaps if all levels of the corporation have equal visibility into a process and are therefore held equally accountable to the execution of a process then we may lower some of the barriers related to information based change.

So in summary, you can't change what you can't measure, creating transparency into a process allows you to measures its results, transparency creates acountability, equality in transparency for all stakeholders of a process reduces the fear associated with accountability and can remove one of the key barriers to change ... willingness to act.

These same concepts can be extended to political systems, social systems etc. not just the corporate world.

Look forward to your comments...