Changing the Culture of an IT Organization – One Wiki Page at a Time!

I’ve been a student of IT organizational culture since I began my management consulting career some 30+ years ago.  It’s wrong, of course, to generalize too broadly, but I’ve worked with literally hundreds of large enterprise IT organizations (i.e., IT organizations of 250+ members) and have seen more commonalities than differences.  Of course, within any IT organization, there are sub-cultures – architects are not the same as operations people or as solution developers – but again, there are more common threads than sharp differences.

Prevent Bad Change…

For all the change that IT organizations bring about for their customers and clients, IT people are generally resistant to change.  I think this resistance is deeply rooted in a couple of factors:

1. IT environments are full of technical complexity – layers upon layers of technology containing multitudes of interfaces and dependencies.  Change something over here and something over their is impacted – sometimes in subtle ways that may not be evident for some time, or until some other seemingly unrelated change is made.
2. IT professionals thrive by taking complex situations and reducing them down – ultimately, to zeroes and ones.  There’s no room for ambiguity in a digital system – as such IT specialists are conditioned to abhor ambiguity.  And yet change is full of ambiguity – what ‘has been’ is no longer, and what ‘will be’ is not yet stabilized.  The natural inclination, then, is to drive out the ambiguity, and typically, the fastest, safest path to achieve that is to revert to the status quo – ending the change before damage is done (or the changed state it reached!)

Meet the Culture Where it is – Or Where You Want it to Go?

This inherent tendency to ‘prevent bad change’ creates some tough dilemma’s when introducing social networking and collaboration capabilities such as Wikis.  Wikis thrive best where a culture is open and emergent – “enabling good change,” if you will.  As you design the governance mechanisms for a Wiki, you have some interesting choices.  For example:

• Do you allow people to create their own pages?  Or do you put controls on who creates and who edits pages?
• Do you allow all spaces to be open to anyone in the organization?  Or do you allow for “private” spaces, where a select few (such as an IT leadership team) collaborate?
• Do you allow people to display avatars that are humorous or ironic?  Or do you insist on “corporate photographs” from people’s security badges?
• Do you allow people to write in their unique voices – even if a little rough around the edges?  Or do you have a Wiki Gardener monitor pages and clean up the rough edges?

To be clear, I’m not talking about allowing people to violate corporate codes of integrity – potentially offensive or inflammatory graphics or text is clearly out of bounds and violations of such codes of conduct should swiftly be managed as performance management issues.  I’m talking about an open and emergent Wiki environment – complete with the bumps and hiccups it may contain, versus a more closed and structured Wiki, protected from potential ‘voices of dissent’ or the raising of challenging or tough issues.

Governance Designed to Meet the Culture Where it is

You can take the position that Wiki governance should be designed for the current state:  “We are locked down, deeply concerned about security and privacy.  We have to have special ‘standards of conduct’ and controls to keep things structured and secure.”

Governance Designed to Help Shift the Culture

Or, do you take the position that the governance should be designed with an eye to the desired future state: “We encourage open dialog and a thriving ‘community of adults’ – keep within our corporate code of integrity and help make the Wiki a safe, valuable and fun place to grow and share our enterprise knowledge about IT.”

Given the people responsible for approving Wiki governance will probably not have significant experience with the more open model, their inclination will be to ‘play it safe’ and design for the current state.  Unfortunately, that is likely to perpetuate the current culture and probably prevent the Wiki from becoming what they want it to become.  It make take one or two strong, visionary leaders to take the leap of faith, and allow a governance model that reflects their aspirations for the culture.

Graphic courtesy of Positive Change

More Hurdles in the Shift from Documents to Wikis

Last week, I posted about The Painful But Rewarding Shift from Documents to Wikis.  In the post I shared some of the lessons my partner and I have learned from our experiences helping IT organizations shift to a Wiki approach for creating organizational clarity and getting people in the organization to engage in continuous improvement.  I will continue with this theme in this post.

When to Edit, When to Comment?

I guess this issue exists equally with Word documents – MS Word has its powerful Reviewing mode with its ability to add comments or to actually edit a document.  The same is true on a Wiki – you can comment on a page, or you can go in and edit the page.  The difference is, we have all been commenting on and editing Word documents for years!  But when you get to a Wiki, you typically don’t have the years of experience, nor do we have the shared but tacit understanding of when commenting makes sense compared with editing.  To the Wiki novice, not feeling sure about when to edit versus comment can freeze you into inaction!  You feel much more ‘exposed’ about making either comments or edits – but edits feel somehow more ‘in your face.’

We have found that a few supporting pages (themselves, a natural fit for a Wiki approach) can be very helpful in covering questions such as “edit or comment”.  Examples include:

• Wiki Collaboration Guidelines and Procedures
• Wiki Manual of Conduct
• Wiki Manual of Style

Additionally, we have found that the gentle guiding hand of a Collaboration Manager and/or a Wiki Gardener can both demonstrate by example and, where appropriate, make adjustments to shift comments to in-line text edits or vice versa.  And, for those who can’t wait to find out the answer by trial and error, we’ve found the general principle is – if you are certain about the change you want to make, go ahead and make it!  The Wiki will let others with an interest in the page see the changes you have made, and they can always be backed out – nothing is ever lost!  If you are less certain, post a comment, quoting the text you want to change (most Wiki tools make that easy to do) and raising the points of discussion that lead you to be tentative about making the change.

Blank Pages Are Intimidating!

I’ve run experiments, creating a new page with an important page title (such as Potential Wiki Governance Principles) and asking folk to “weigh in.”  Perhaps not surprisingly, nobody does.  Add a few threads of text, or a contentious issue (that might be addressed by a principle or two) and people start to weigh in.  As I said, this is not surprising.  People are intimidated by blank pages.  Having said that, as a consultant who has facilitated hundreds of workshops, I know that starting with a “clean sheet” is rarely a good idea.  However, there are situations (and team dynamics) where a clean sheet is exactly the best place to start.  Which is why I ran the ‘blank page’ experiment.  At least one lesson learned would be: you can make things happen in a facilitated workshop that you can’t achieve on a Wiki!

Free, Open (and Risky?) Versus Controlled, Closed (and Safe?)

For whatever reason, my partner and I tend to find ourselves working on social media and collaboration initiatives with companies that have traditionally been somewhat “locked down” and conservative – often in highly regulated industries.  They have an inevitable (and understandable) bias towards controls and regulations – more concerned with “stopping bad things happening” than with “making good things happen!”  Unfortunately, this is not an ideal culture for open collaboration and knowledge exchange!  As much as they want to move to a more open and sharing culture, their natural instinct is to “govern and control.”

Given this, one of the issues we find ourselves coming back to as we navigate the changes inherent in becoming more open and collaborative is, ‘Do we manage the change from the current culture or from the culture we hope to change to?’  The temptation is to draw up a list of rules and create governance bodies and processes to manage the environment.  This is what people expect – but the question is, do such approaches serve to reinforce the current culture as opposed to fostering the desired culture?  Do rules and regulations send a message to people, that, “This is business as usual – be careful, think twice before you write or comment!”  And do such messages, unintended as they may be, tend to shut down otherwise valuable dialog and knowledge exchange?  Do they perpetuate the status quo?

We argue (and have demonstrated) that less rules and regulations are more effective in engaging stakeholders and fostering healthy dialog – without bringing the organization to its knees or being overrun with lawyers!  Of course, someone (the role is often called Wiki Gardener) has to monitor the site and take corrective action when needed.  They have to coach accidental transgressors.  Deliberate or malicious transgression is a performance management issue and must be handled as such – with firm and immediate action.

What have your experience been with Wikis in IT?  How have you handled “rules and regulations”?

 

Photo courtesy of Bionic Band: Home of Bionic Band Sports

The Painful But Rewarding Shift from Documents to Wikis

I posted recently on the question, Can Social Media Significantly Improve the Ways IT Work Is Performed?  The post began to share some of the lessons learned as I continue to work with IT organizations that are pushing into the “social media” age and using tools such as Wikis and Social Networking to drive IT performance improvement.

Document Orientation – The Wikis Greatest Enemy!

My colleague and business partner Roy Youngman posted a while back on the question, “Why are Wikis in Corporate IT Rare?”  In the post he posited that most corporations, especially IT departments, are entrenched in a document-oriented approach as the means for developing, codifying, and sharing knowledge.  Roy made an important point that:

Paradoxically, ‘document-orientation’ is both the main reason why Wikis are rare in the corporate world and the main reason why Wikis are great for the corporate world.”

Wiki Benefits – A Solution to the Shackles of Document-Centricity!

Roy went on to explain that:

The Wiki approach addresses almost all the short-comings of ‘document-orientation’.  The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few.  A Wiki approach enhances the discovery of knowledge and exposes the subject matter in the greatest need of improvement. And the improvement is a constant theme – the very heart and soul of a Wiki.”

From Document to Wiki – Changing Mindsets One Page at a Time!

I’ve been using document-centric tools such as Word and PowerPoint since they first became available in the late 1970’s.  Beyond the simple accessing of Wikipedia, I’ve been actively using Wikis such a MediaWiki and Confluence since 2005.  So I have significant experience both in the traditional world of documents, and the more contemporary world of Wikis.  And I can tell you, the shift from document-centricity to Wikis is non-trivial!  I can also tell, it is HUGELY BENEFICIAL!

Here’s a sampling of the mental hurdles I’ve had to navigate in order to realize the full benefits of a Wiki approach.

When to “Polish” Versus When to “Collaboratively Evolve”?

Historically, when I’ve been creating some kind of deliverable (a Word document Project Charter, or a client project briefing PowerPoint deck for example) I’ve always felt that it has to be polished to a high degree.  Many years ago, a wise and seasoned consultant and mentor advised me to always produce quality documents – both in terms of content and look and feel.  He said, “If it looks shabby and full of typos, how can you expect the client to take it seriously?”  The latter point is not necessarily obvious based on the deliverables I see from many consultants.  As an example, I saw a key deliverable produced by a large consulting firm that was full of typos, grammatical and formatting errors.  The final insult was that a PowerPoint slide misspelled the CIO’s name – in a key presentation that was given to the CIO!

By contrast, when I start to create a Wiki page, I feel almost obliged (and grateful!) to start with a much rougher “draft” and look forward to the ensuing “collaborative polishing” that will emerge.  Sounds obvious, but getting comfortable with a “rough draft” as a starting point did not come easily to me until I began to notice that people were less inclined to collaborate on a document if it looked highly polished and “print ready”.  Learning when to “polish” and when to release “draft” material is not always obvious and is very situationally dependent – demanding a keen sensitivity to the specific context for the document.

Structure, Linking, Tagging and Factoring in a Wiki World

I’ve always paid attention to document structure.  I believe I understand the basic principles of good structure, and learned a lot about logical structure from the powerful Minto Pyramid Principle back in the late 1980’s.  But when you get to a Wiki, things change!  The ability to hot-link across “documents” and to external sources in ways that just don’t work in a document-based world (who knows where any given document will be located?) changes the way you think about structure.

Tagging and Folksonomies create another layer of possibilities (and another layer to think about!) that is rarely used effectively in a traditional document environment.  The concept of factoring, well understood (if not always followed!) by programmers, involves structuring content for maximum reusability, minimum redundancy, and ease of search.  These are typically not considerations in a traditional document approach.

One of the many benefits of a Wiki is that it enables an entire collection of ideas and information to be placed into a single, hyper-linked space.  But if that space is a messy structure, the benefits may quickly erode.  If you aren’t a programmer (or, at least, not a good programmer!) you may need access to a Wiki expert for help in thinking through the structuring of a given space – especially if you are using a Wiki that allows for a hierarchical structure among pages.

Does eMail Traffic Really Reduce?

A client I was working with recently was (appropriately!) paranoid about anything that drove up eMail traffic.  When they learned that the Wiki could send eMail notifications about changes, they were immediately hesitant to utilize this feature.  While it’s natural to want to find ways to reduce eMail traffic, we’ve found that there’s an important distinction between “normal” eMails, that come from people and automatic notifications.  The former typically demands time and activity – responding to the email.  The latter is purely and helpfully informational.  Also, if you aren’t finding the information helpful, then turn off the automatic alerts!

The great news for this client, in addition to discovering that automatic informational eMails in the form of Wiki alerts were far less intrusive and demanding than real eMails from people, was that the transition to a Wiki approach dramatically reduced the person-to-person eMail traffic, as the endless cycle of passing documents around was replaced by collaborative editing of a Wiki.

I’ll look at more of these “mindset changes” associated with the shift to Wikis in upcoming posts.

Image courtesy of Westwood K-8 Technology