Technology and Organizations

I’ve been talking about TOP Management for a while (here, here & here), but I’ve yet to devote a post to defining the importance and boundaries of this concept.

TOP Management includes:

• Technology: Applications, network infrastructures, and even hard technologies like assembly lines – the quality, access, integration, and support of these systems
• Organizational Policies, Procedures, and Structures: Approaches to recruitment, hiring (both contract and permanent), training, evaluation, pay and other performance management activities; Team or individual contributor focused structures, layers of management, focus on outsourcing, and the like
• People: How many of them there are, the skills they have when they are hired, the basics of human reactions (people go towards rewards and away from punishment), their demographic backgrounds, languages they speak, etc.

The background to this image is the Context: Local or global, leader or follower in industry, pace of industry, types of competition, and so on.

Our work is not done in silos – yet much of our technology infrastructure and work practice are built as if it were. Too often discussions of management practice look at technology, people, or organization. Rarely do we see them addressed in a balanced way.

Modern management means thinking of ways to weave tools, practices, and employee capabilities into a single strong, yet flexible, fabric. We all need to practice a bit of systems design and have systems savvy, but we need to understand the breadth and opportunities of these broader intertwined systems. TOP Management gives us this breadth.

I’ve been using the Obama campaign as an example of an organization practicing effective TOP Management. They used social media technologies in an organized way. Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s four founders, left Facebook to work on the Obama campaign and this digital outreach worked. In July of 2008, the Nielsen tracking company reported that the Obama campaign website had 2.3 million unique visitors during the month, compared to McCain’s 563,000 (pdf of report). Many credit the campaign’s fund raising success with their ability to energize a new set of voters in this new way. The campaign understood the technology, they effectively created organizational practices to leverage the technology, and they understood the people who they were trying to reach.

Had the Obama campaign used social media in an uncoordinated way (ignoring the organizational aspects), they likely would have failed. Had they ignored younger voters (a particular focus on people), they likely would have failed. Had they ignored the opportunities of the social media technology, they likely would have failed as a key segment of their voters were not paying attention to traditional TV advertising. The value came when they intertwined these dimensions to create powerful new approach to running a campaign. (See discussions of the challenges the Obama administration faces now that they are in office and constrained by Federal limitations on technology use.)

The ability to practice TOP Management may be the most important skill a modern manager can have. Having “emotional intelligence,” “soft skills,” and the like are key, but the big impact comes from knowing how to work with technology, organizational practices, and people at the same time. Technology and organizational practice are what allow us to leverage the skill and motivation of our people.

I agree with Nicholas Thompson. In his Wired article, Too Early to Criticize Obama’s Tech Policy?, he proposes “Not an A. But not a C either” for the grade to give the Obama administration in this first month and a half.

As I noted in an earlier post (also linking to a Wired article), the government is hamstrung by its size, and by a variety of laws meant to provide access and protection to all. Fast prototyping is not as attractive when a mistake is a breach of Federal law and likely to be covered by the national and international press.

I urge us all to give the administration some benefit of the doubt when it comes to technology implementation. However, I also hope our representatives are seriously considering how much of this needs to be specifically covered by law, and whether some of the laws that we have need to be revisited in light of modern technology and its use.

One issue of concern in the new Wired article is where the role of CTO sits. Thompson writes,

The most legitimate complaint so far is that Obama has yet to appoint a CTO. Not only that, but the position appears to have been demoted. The Sunlight Foundation caught an executive order declaring that the CTO will sit in the president’s Domestic Policy Council. That’s better than what some people feared—that the CTO would just be knocked into the Office of Management and Budget—but not nearly as good as people hoped when they had visions of the CTO (Eric Schmidt!? Jeff Bezos?!) sitting in an office down the hall from Obama.

Structure and technology go hand in hand in good organizational design. I’m hoping that we get both a CTO (to guide government technology policy) and a CIO (to guide government technology infrastructure). In the mean time, I’m following the blog, Tech President, described by Thompson as the “best blog for following these issues in depth.”