Chapter 1: Groupware - The Changing Environment

By David Coleman

ISBN# 0-13-727728-8, Copyright 1997, 720 pp.
Now available through Prentice Hall

1.12 Groupware and De-engineering

Collaborative technologies often supports the concept of self organizing systems in our consulting activities. The underlying premise comes from Chaos theory—it leads us to believe that perturbing such systems at a critical time can cause the systems to re-organize into a higher order (less chaos). We believe that since most human systems have some degree of chaos, that human systems (organizations, people, processes) also have the ability to self organize, instead of being re-engineered.

The idea of self organizing and reorganizing systems is fundamentally different from re-engineering in that it re-engineering attempts to exert control over chaos, but imposing a new system template, and a new semblance of order. Self organizing systems are always seen in process (like a learning organization). In this self organizing model, the system has to redesign itself, this means that no outside control is exerted or imposed upon the system, just a perturbation to get the process started. However, it helps if the people who are reorganizing themselves know where the organization or business wants to go.

The process of reorganizing to a less chaotic system hopefully follows the informational goals of the organization. These goals can be stated in a Knowledge Architecture (KA), an overarching view of where knowledge is in the organization, where it flows and where it is best used. When this KA is combined with the right groupware tools, the KA enables people and organizations to self re-organize, resulting is a qualitatively superior organization than the organization which results from traditional re-engineering.

People, and the processes they work with, are dynamic. My view is that given the right tools and environment people will re-engineer themselves, and be much more successful. But successful self re-engineering requires that the people involved understand knowledge creation, knowledge flow (which is process oriented and related to workflow), and knowledge management. Additionally, the project champion must be prepared to work with the people, culture and organization as well as the technology infrastructure and software applications.

1.12.1 Self Re-engineered Systems

Margaret Wheatley, an organizational development professional at the Berkana Institute, is working with the issues of increased velocity of change, increased velocity of information (brought on by technology), and new and more flexible organizational structures. All of this happens while trying to make order out of a chaotic and paradoxical universe (or business climate).

Wheatley is not so different from the rest of us, except in her approach, turning to new science for answers to organizational questions. She moved from an investigation of organizations to some of the new discoveries in hard science: quantum physics, self organizing systems and chaos theory. Her belief is that metaphors from all of these disciplines can help organizations deal with many issues facing them today.

Wheatley is looking for a simpler way to manage organizations, or for ways that organizations can manage themselves in this complex, chaotic, and ever-changing environment. Interestingly, BPR is a methodology many have used, or tried to use, to impose order over chaos, especially in business processes.

This is where groupware and knowledge architectures come in. Groupware, which supports communication, collaboration and coordination, is the informational glue which ties together today’s and tomorrow’s organizations. A knowledge architecture is a framework that looks at the flows of information in a corporation, organization or enterprise, and helps structure this information so it has meaning and becomes knowledge. Information becomes knowledge when it is actionable, when it is incorporated by people and they use it, believe it or do it! But more importantly, this knowledge becomes a corporate resource with quantifiable value, and that resource can then be applied where it is most needed for competitive advantage.

1.12.2 Groupware and Organizational Change

Ms. Wheatley, is of the learning organizations school, much like Peter Senge. This school of management science believes that in order to survive, organizations, just like the people that compose them, must continuously change or die! Flexibility, the ability to deal with continual change, is the earmark of a “learning organization.” The traditional hierarchies that worked well for command and control organizations from feudal times on (see Figure 4) are giving way to “fishnet”, spaghetti, and other types of organizations that Tom Malone of MIT and Alvin Toffler (the futurist) call “adhocracies.”

Figure 1.4
(courtesy of Robert Johansen and Swigart "Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization" pg16.)

Wheatley notes that our view of natural and social structures comes from 17th century Newtonian physics, a view that is drawn from the world of the natural sciences. But as our view of science changes, so does our view of organizations.

Wheatley feels that case studies, that various management consultants have written up about famous organizations, can give us little more than a road map of where others have gone, not a good map for where we are going. Insofar as the transfer of knowledge about organizational change involves some general principles, they will be abstracted from these case studies. However, the specifics of change within a particular organization are not always transferable between organizations, generally because corporate cultures tend to be distinctive, and different companies operate in different organizational circumstances.

1.12.3 The Subjective Universe

Illya Prigogine, the Novel prize-winning chemist who worked with crystal structures, noted that when he disturbed these structures/systems at a specific time they re-organized themselves into a higher level of order. He postulated that dissipated structures or living systems have the ability to respond to disorder with renewed life and move to a higher plane of organization.

In management science these new ideas have been used to examine the roles of leadership, relationship, and motivation. Organizations are looking at what the whole person brings rather, than just traditional view of the person as a machine or a cog on the wheel of a big machine (a Tayloristic and mechanistic view). Vision, today can be seen as such a force or field for change. Organizations are seen as living, dynamic, entities with as many properties as the people who make them up.

Today, the BPR philosophy focuses on control and structures rather than on purpose and direction. We no longer let the structure emerge the way a stream finds its course down a hill. Instead, we try to structure a process or an outcome. The fact that BPR has not met with great success leads us to believe that we may be taking the wrong approach; rather than imposing a structure (re-engineering) on a business or process, it might be better to provide a direction (like the stream) and some tools to help the organization move in that direction and then let the people re-engineer themselves.

We believe “the direction” is provided by a knowledge architecture, and the tools for self re-engineering systems are found in the groupware arena. Many of our clients have come to understand that the changes they are looking for are available through self re-organization, rather than imposed upon them by re-engineering. As capable, intelligent people who work with these processes on a day-to-day basis, they can make the appropriate improvements -- IF they are given the right tools and a clear corporate direction.