Organisational structure and its impact on your information culture

A workshop detailing the effects of consolidating your organisation’s information-management functions and their impact on your information culture. By David Deveau.

In these days of Sarbanes-Oxley, Enron, massive IT budgets, off-shore outsourcing and the demographic aging of our corporate experience, it is more important than ever that organisations have a broad, robust strategy to address their information-management objectives.

There are several factors that are fundamental to any good corporate strategy. For example, what Amar Bhide, professor of Business at Columbia University Graduate School of Business, refers to as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure. ‘Hard’ refers to organisational structure, while ‘soft’ covers organisational culture and norms. This concept has a direct application to information-management strategy.

This workshop will explore the idea that, through consistent vision and integration, a consolidation of the corporate functions that determine how you deal with information can have a significant impact on your ‘information culture’.

In turn, this can have a heavy impact on the effectiveness of each component of information management: namely, information technology and business alignment; information privacy and security; records management (transparency and compliance); and even corporate measurement. It will also explore the assertion that it is time to revisit the role of the chief-information officer and others in your organisation, so that you can take a more holistic approach to corporate information.

The connection between business strategy, organisational change and your ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure
We all know that successful business strategy relies on many elements working together. These include: good policy formulation; adequate human, financial, and other resources; and, clear objectives. Unfortunately, two things that can have a fundamental impact on strategy – your organisational structure and your corporate culture – are very often ignored when attempting to achieve strategic aims.

The essential theory is that organisational structure often determines how strong and consistent the vision will be, which is associated with specific strategies. It can also clear paths for getting things done within the organisation, because the authority to make things happen will come from the right leaders (you can reduce the barriers associated with power struggles and turf battles).

On the culture side, anyone who has been involved in organisational change will know that you can have the best laid plans and resources in place, but if your people: do not understand; do not believe; do not buy-in; or, if their values and norms (culture) don’t match what you are trying to do, then failure is likely. Although this idea is not limited to technology-related change, it is one of the most common reasons that IT projects fail. Not because of bad applications or vendors, but because corporate culture is not evaluated and accounted for in advance of changing the way people are expected to do their work.

Acknowledging that you have an information culture
OK, so what does all this cultural and organisational structure talk have to do with information management? Well, the first order of business needs is to acknowledge that one of the many faces of corporate culture that exists is information culture. What’s that?

Well, if culture is values and norms, then information culture is the combination of values and norms associated with the way we collect, process, share, disseminate, or otherwise deal with information. Specifically, we can look at information culture by considering how we tend to approach information transparency, access, collaboration, secrecy, securityand such things as attitudes towards accountability for records management, ownership and accountability of knowledge and information, and the actual value we place on information assets.

A case for consolidating information management functions under a single executive

If we accept the previous train of logic, wherby organisational structure and corporate culture are fundamental players in executing strategy (furthermore, that information culture is part of corporate culture), the next question is how do we pull this theory together for information management?

It can be argued that there are several distinct but closely-related organisational functions that share information as a common denominator. Think of accounts payable, budgeting, and financial audit as all sharing finance as their common denominator. For information management, these related functions would include:

Information technology;
Access and privacy;
Records management;
Web-content management;
Corporate research, statistics and measurement;
Information security;
Other information services (for example, library reference).

If you think about this list, which may be a little different at your workplace, all of the functions are critically tied to one another.

For example, if IT needs to develop a new database-management system for one of its clients, what are the connections? The collection, use and dissemination of any personal information must comply with privacy regulation. The archiving and disposition of information within the database will have to be consistent with your records management classification scheme and disposition schedules.

You will want to leverage statistical expertise to draw analytical intelligence from your data for research and decision-making purposes.

The impact of consolidation on your information culture
So, you have consolidated your key information management functions. How does this impact your information culture? Consider doing the following:

Creating a full-time executive champion for information management

Signals importance of information management to all staff;
Creates single contact and ‘face’ to help market information management;
Increases visibility,status and understanding;
Generates awareness of challenges and needs;
Could draw potential solutions from staff.

Consolidating IM functions

Promotes understanding among branches;
Highlights synergies and overlapping or common goals;
Reveals inconsistent policies.

Single face and contact for information management
Information-management issues suffer from some of the same challenges as other broad management concepts. For example, if you are an information-management professional, you may see the distinctions between the parts. But, if you are a line business unit, all you know is that you have a business need and the answer has something to do with IT. Consolidating around a single executive and group allows clients of information services to bring their issues to one team, and the burden of figuring out every information-management issue that exists and with whom they must consult is eliminated. The likelihood that the average client is going to understand all technical, access and privacy, records management, and other information-management issues associated with their business problem (and seek out the right staff member) is slim at best.

In the case of a consolidated information-management group, they need only recognise the single face and the professionals within will help ensure all issues are identified and addressed.

Information-management principles and policies

It is easy to imagine numerous areas in an organisation that may suffer from policy incoherence. Expanding on our previous example, take the development of an IT database where there is absolutely no functional specification addressing the protection of personal information. To the IT business analyst and the business client, the main goals may be to create opportunities for more efficient analysis, reporting and dissemination of information. Similarly, IT’s development process may not consider the need to capture the information collected within databases into the corporate records system.

When an IM group consolidates, one of the goals is to assess one another’s processes. These processes can often then be integrated where beneficial, in order to promote consistent application of policies and principles.

In our example, that could mean something as simple as including a privacy impact assessment as part of every major IT system design or enhancement. It may involve the automatic review of information-automation projects for compliance with records-management standards. These are simple examples, but the familiarity that results between information-management functions when they are managed as part of one team under a single business plan will identify these kinds of integration opportunities. A new take on the role of the chief information officer

Most chief information officers (CIOs) concentrate principally on IT. In fact, one colleague said that he longed for the day when we actually had true CIOs, rather than chief information technology officers, which often tends to be the case.

There seems to be little distinction between CIOs and chief technology officers – the titles are quite often used interchangeably.

This consolidation model could be seen as a natural evolution of the CIO office resulting from the convergence of, and inter-relationships between information-management functions.

Essentially, the argument is that CIOs need to be champions of IT and its relationship to information privacy, security and records management – which should all be approached with the same vision and strategy.

Ironically, at a time when some industry gurus are questioning the future need of CIOs, this model would suggest that they are actually the ideal corporate leaders to address the converging issues of information management. It is a very logical and complementary expansion of the existing role of CIOs. Unfortunately, such models are rare, and we continue to see IT isolated from privacy officers and records management systems, and so on.

The challenges
Obviously, there are challenges within this approach, and the big one is turf/empires/ silos – whatever you wish to call them. Some specific issues include:

Leadership of information-management functions may feel that it is being buried or marginalised in organisational structure;
Consolidation represents a loss of power and influence to current ‘owners’ of information-management functions;
Corporate information-management approaches can be perceived as a threat to the authority of silos outside of information management.

Another challenge is the perception and engagement of other leaders. Information management is not as mature as other management areas like finance or HR, so just defining it to people can be a struggle. In the end, information-management issues, while critical, can appear very administrative to operational leaders and the fact is that, to them, it isn’t exactly the most exciting executive topic.

Examining the pros and cons of various organisational structure models
To conclude this workshop, a serious of generic organisation charts are presented in figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 (figure 1 represents my chosen model) for evaluation.

Following the models is a list of factors that should be considered when deciding what makes sense in your context. Please note that the exact titles are less important than general functions being represented for the exercise.

Summary
The main theory behind this workshop boils down to a few simple ideas:

Because of evolving corporate changes associated with information-management issues, effective vision and strategies are critical;
Business strategy depends on both your corporate culture and your ‘hard’ infrastructure (organisational structure);
Change-management success will be greatly affected by your corporate culture;
Corporate culture includes ‘information culture’;
Information culture is defined as the principles and values that drive the way you deal with information;
Information culture (can be greatly influenced by your organisational structure;

Consolidation of information-management functions under a single executive – evolution of the CIO – can be a powerful strategy for strengthening information management in your organisation.

Although it may not be particularly simple, the logic and power of this approach to organisational structure and leadership for information management can transform your information agenda.

In turn, this can often result in better integration of organisational functions, more consistency in the way you deal with corporate-information assets, and improved IT/information-management business alignment. n

David Deveau is executive director for information management at the Nova Scotia Department of Justice. A presenter at numerous information-management related conferences, he can be contacted at: deveaudt@gov.ns.ca.

Box-out: Exercise one
Take a moment and try to recall a significant organisational-change initiative in your environment that failed. Do you remember the kinds of conversation that occurred around the water cooler? Did people have a lack of understanding of why the change was necessary? Did they reject new ways of thinking? Was there a general lack of buy-in or ‘uptake’ to make the project a success?

Box-out: Exercise two
Create a matrix with each of your primary information-management functions listed vertically and horizontally. For each function, see if you can list at least two or three significant questions that should be asked relative to each other function. As an example, you could use IT and consider issues of a privacy, records management, research, web publishing and information-security nature. You would then do this for each other function. The point of this exercise is that it should reveal a complex set of considerations across information-management functions, underscoring the value of consolidated executive management.

Box-out: Exercise three
It can help if you conduct the following exercise to get a sense of what ‘information culture’ exists in your organisation. On a scale of one to five, (with one being ‘strongly agree’ and five ‘strongly disagree’), evaluate whether the following statements are true when applied to your organisation. Again, the point of this exercise is to determine what information values are actually evident in your work place. (Note: the statements are adapted from an internal employee survey used to evaluate information values at the Nova Scotia Department of Justice.)

Information is easy to access;
Access to information is controlled to ensure protection of privacy, while not creating barriers to routine access;
My workplace promotes openness and sharing of information with its external partners;
My workplace promotes openness and sharing of information with the public, etc;
Information I access to do my job is accurate;
Information I access to do my job is up to date;
My workplace provides effective ways of managing information electronically where needed;
Information is provided in a way that promotes transparency;
Information is provided in a way that promotes accountability;
People and functions take ownership of the information they are responsible for;
Adequate audit trails exist to show how decisions are made;
Adequate audit trails exist to show how information has been used;
My workplace follows and promotes corporate policies and practices related to the management of information;
Where business requirements are similar, common IT solutions are used across the workplace;
Information systems are highly integrated (work together);
Information management goals are a visible part of business planning and performance management;
The value of our information assets (for example, data and IT systems) is legally protected.

Box-out: Factors to consider

Level within the organisation (influence of information management);
Consistency among information-management functions (vision, balance etc);
Overlap between these functions (turf battles);
Maintaining identity;
Simplicity versus complexity;
Effects on governance;
Fit to organisational culture;
Accountability of the strategy