The Music of Management
"I've been playing with the idea about the metaphors that we use to manage information technology," Linder explains. "If you hear the way we talk about it, it's almost always a manufacturing metaphor. We inventory the data, we have warehouses, we process it, report it, we have architecture . . . it's all mechanistic. We're thinking about it as all of these itty-bitty things; you put these two bits of data together and you get one larger more important thing.
"But that's not it. Or maybe it is but only on one level.
"I think about a metaphor of music. Information is the notes on the page, but that's not really what you're after. You're after what it evokes - the interpretation, which could be the same today or tomorrow, or it could be different today and tomorrow from the same piece of music. It works because we get onto the same wavelength.
"When I hand you a piece of sheet music, that's worthless, but when we hear the music and discuss it together, that's when we're starting to talk about information."
Linder admits that her musical thesis is still in the formative stages; it doesn't have everything, but it has some interesting ways to think about it, she feels. The application of her metaphor lies more in the upper echelons of outsourcing relationships than at the utility level.
"In the contractual view, I get my report, I beat you over the head if you haven't mown the lawn enough times this month and we have penalties and so forth, because I can easily tell what you did. But the minute you're getting into something that is a little more intimately related with your business, where it is going to change, where you can't specify it, now we need to have a little music, because we're going to have to work together. And when we're utterly dependent on each other, which you get at the other transformational or committed end, we'd better be both singing in sync."
Her message rings a chord with our commentators.
Petty agrees. "Absolutely. Any process involving people is not black and white. If you judge music, you always look at it technically: Did they play it right? - which is the metrics. Then there is: Did I actually like it? As long as you provide a basis for getting the scoring banding right, then the subjectivity - the humanist part - definitely plays a key role. You can say why you didn't like it.
"The biggest reason for failure in most IT projects is lack of communication. When I look at an [IT] project the first thing I want to see is the communications plan, and people look at you like you're insane. Surely you want to look at a project plan? Surely you want to look at the financials? Not me, I want to understand who you've spoken to, how you're talking to them, how you're getting feedback. That is a concept that is very unusual from an IT point of view.
"Most IT departments in my view are isolationist. They've built big walls and they're very good at explaining why it's someone else's fault when something went wrong," Petty says.
"If that's the situation for your IT team, the best way to get some alignment to the business is to go and focus on processes within the business that you think you can improve, working with them and helping them to build up. That will cause a few things to happen. One, you'll have to talk to the business; two you'll build up an understanding that business processes change and they morph, and hopefully you'll build up skill sets in business management that, working with those processes and automating and optimizing those processes, you'll realize that a lot about process change is more about optimization of people than it is about systems."
Abrahams agrees. "At the end of the day, it's people. Every step is a learning process; this is a marriage." Or perhaps a parent-child relationship, he says, based on nurture, flexibility, some discipline and open expectations. "But sometimes it's the vendor who is the parent, who needs to bring the customer to the market."
Harris takes the music thread one step further to its ultimate harmonic convergence. "The analogy I get is when you bang two tuning forks together. What happens when they come together and they're in time, the tines start to pulse; they are exactly in time and they are exactly sounding the same. That's what this is about, trying to create something like that," he says.
If you've got the music in you, then perhaps a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
SIDEBAR: The Miracle Syndrome
You can't outsource responsibility
Jane Linder, Accenture associate partner and one of the authors of "Control: Getting it and keeping it in business process outsourcing", stresses that with business process outsourcing, direct controls place emphasis on the provider; indirect controls require a greater effort on the part of the client.
"Taking a dynamic approach to BPO control requires that executives invest more time and thought in managing their provider than they may have anticipated," the report states.
This means you cannot outsource responsibility.
"If there is one single biggest error executives make when they undertake outsourcing, it's believing that they don't have to manage it any more," Linder says. "I call this the miracle syndrome: 'I've got a process, I don't like it, I'm not particularly good at it, I haven't allocated any capital to it. Now I'm going to outsource it to you and now I want miracles . . . Why haven't you fixed it overnight?'
"They [executives] should outsource because they want some other benefits and they don't want to manage detailed task design or hiring and firing or whatever it takes to get the people to do the function. But you can't give up responsibility for managing something that is critical to the business," Linder says.
"Even if it's finance and accounting or HR, people say that's not core, that's not strategic. Well, I'm sorry, that's still important for your business to operate. You still own accountability for it."
SIDEBAR: BPO: The Surprise Benefits
Want to see the whole picture? Step outside the frame
The Accenture report "Control: Getting it and keeping it in business process outsourcing" cites again and again examples of organizations getting a greater range, quality and depth of information on their own performance via the outsourced relationship than they ever had when the processes were undertaken in-house.
A European communications company: "BPO enabled us to get reliable company-wide financial information for the first time."
The CFO of a large division of a US-based real property company: "After outsourcing, we have more accurate transactions, including margins."
Bill Pahl, COO of the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry: "Prior to [evaluating outsourcing] there was a reluctance to invest the necessary time and effort in measuring the cost [of services]."
Other observations range from: "brought the company face-to-face with comprehensive and reliable management information for the first time" to "processes that were once full of workarounds, overlapping accountability and fuzzy hand-offs became crisp, clean and open".
This makes you wonder how these organizations ever operated efficiently (if, in fact, they did) prior to outsourcing. Surely they should have had this information before.
"It's actually more common than not," Linder says.
"Companies are worried about growth," she says. "They're merging, they're acquiring, they've got operations sprinkled all over the place. The CFO or IT infrastructure might not have come up to the point where it's all standardized - you've got one system, I've got another. Or we may have the same system, but you report things differently or add them up in a different way.
"When you outsource, you give the job of standardising and adding discipline to your outsourcing provider; you have to specifically give that job to them and manage your own organization to make that happen. If you simply expect it of them without doing your part it's not going to happen either. But if that's part of the deal to consolidate things, the quality of information that results can be fabulous."
Lots of people say they could or should do that themselves.
"Yes, you could," Linder says, "but it would require you to focus on that, the energy, the capital, the management bandwidth. Is that what's going to pay off for you? When you're sitting at the top spot and you're trying to figure out what am I going to do about this hard problem, frequently the data you have, even if it's completely tight in your data warehouse, isn't the data you need to answer those questions. It's not your competitive intelligence, it doesn't have that smell that you have for how things are going in the market."
Of course, this might be a self-fulfilling situation, that the companies who do not have relevant information are the ones that need outsourcing, and if you have got the information, it means you've got the internal discipline and focus, so you do not need outsourcing. Nevertheless, it makes for an interesting bullet point on your evaluation list.
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