Part 4 of "Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate, Decide: How IT Achieves Strategic Leadership," our article in Cutter IT Journal, November '08
Part 3 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 1 is here.
Coordination: Mapping the Organization
IT has great reach and scope when it comes to providing unique organizational information in novel and quantitative ways. It can map the organization to aid communication, collaboration, and coordination. And it can analyze the maps to produce data about the organization that supports the large-scale decision-making capacity.
Using its directories, permissions, databases, and streams of information flow, IT can construct maps that make the organization’s working networks visible and accessible. Such views complement the limited horizon of direct experience most executives rely upon.
BCKS provides an example of how these maps can help a small network of organizations visualize its assembly into a new organizational function. The Combined Arms Center (CAC), the Army’s intellectual and educational hub, recently decided to create an organization-wide knowledge function called CAC-Knowledge (see Figure 3). Its purpose is to coordinate functions and share services within and between five key organizations: BCKS, the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD), the Combat Studies Institute (CSI), and the prestigious publication Military Review. Knowledge flows directly from soldiers and leaders in BCKS-provided large professional community forums (e.g., CompanyCommand.com) and small team rooms, from after-action reviews and other sources through CALL, to the codification of current best practice into Army doctrine through CADD, and to publications that provide special knowledge, broad context, and deep history.
To gain a complete picture of the formal organization beyond the reporting hierarchy, enterprises need to map their networks of matrix reports, the burgeoning multi-team memberships, and the horizontal workflow handoffs between teams. As more kinds of relationships are added to the reporting hierarchy, these maps offer an increasingly comprehensive, easy-to-navigate, common mental model of the whole network and its interdependencies. When organizations widely share such interconnected maps with those who work in them, they create a “transparency of the whole.” Such views help provide organizational awareness — shared global contexts for making local decisions. This is akin to the military’s “situational awareness” of the physical context.
For leaders who run suborganizations of hundreds and thousands of people, accurate maps of the complex organizational whole are becoming essential as changes are made in faraway functions. Meanwhile, many HR organizations have been identifying social networks of influence and information that thread through the people occupying places on the org chart of jobs. By making transparent the currently invisible networks that connect people, organizations, and work, IT enables everyone to function more intelligently, be more aware of the whole, and be more capable of achieving shared goals.
