December 29, 2006: Organizational "Health Maintenance"

I would like to continue to explore the point I raised on December 26 to the effect that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Obviously, if an organization is in a pathological state, then that pathology needs to be treated; but there are (at least) two aspects of health maintenance that are likely to facilitate treatment.

1. There is the need to cultivate an awareness of pathologies, since, as if often the case with human patients, it is often (frequently?) the case that the organization does not know when it is in a pathological state.
2. There is also the need to cultivate preventative measures: An organization that is aware of a potential pathology is better equipped to "nip that pathology in the bud," dealing with it before it has a serious impact.

So how do we implement such measures for an organization? In medicine we know about the physical examination and the frequency with which it should be performed (having now "graduated" to an age where I have to have mine annually). However, this time scale is to coarse for the world of business. An enterprise functions on the basis of ongoing business processes, and those processes need to be monitored in the course of their functioning. IT is now in a position the make sure that such processes are running reliably and accurately; so this is the first step towards making the health maintenance metaphor "work."

However, such monitoring cannot be conducted for its own sake. The data generated by monitoring drives the formulation of hypotheses that address detecting, diagnosing, and treating pathologies. Some rather interesting visualization technology has gone into "driving" dashboard displays that deliver monitoring data; but the hypothesis data generated by managers at all levels of the enterprise are equally important to health maintenance. When a hypothesis is posed, it will (almost?) always need to be vetted by several managers throughout the enterprise; so we need some kind of "dashboard visualization" to provide awareness of the current "state of the hypothesis space" and facilitate the vetting process.

How can all of this take place? In his book Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan addressed this question by bringing another metaphor into play:

The formal analysis and diagnosis of organizations, like the process of reading, always rests in applying some kind of theory to the situation being considered.

In other words the real purpose of visualization, of both monitoring data and hypothesis spaces, is to enable managers to read their organization, a concept that inspired the subtitle of James Taylor's fascinating book on organizational communication. I would further argue, to draw upon another previous discussion, that we are talking here about a literary approach to reading, rather than any kind of objective or analytic one. In the context of another favorite theme, managers should be able to think about the people in an organization as subjects rather than objects. The danger of visualization is that it serves up abstractions that entail excessive objectification, but this danger is more likely to add to any looming pathologies than to deal with them.

This then leads to my final point, which is the recurring question of whether or not tools such as Wikipedia and Google are eroding our skills for being critical readers, whether of texts or of organizations. We are more interested in tools that deliver answers, and reading is not necessarily about delivering answers. As I previously suggested, sometime one has to go "roundabout" the questions; and literary reading enables such "roundabout" thinking. This may take more time that finding an answer from a search result or a Wikipedia entry; but, where the health of an organization is concerned, getting to the most effective answer is more important than getting there "efficiently."