Increased productivity

• Eliminate the pain –  People have in wasting time looking for info. (Statistic looking for info 30%, 40%)
• Eliminate the pain longer than necessary startup time in joining an existing project.
• Develop a governance structure
• How determine who gets access to the system?
• How are users’ permissions/roles determined?
• How are standards set?

"You have probably noticed the recent research and magazine articles about "the agile IT organization." &.. The research on agile IT organizations boils down to a recommendation that IT be transformed to operate like a business, much like an external service provider. This advice implicitly assumes that if IT's execution is perfected, then the outcome will be agility, and the core complaints of your business partners will be addressed.

CIOs … should strive to enable their business partners' ability to satisfy their day-to-day IT needs on their own, without having to wait in lengthy governance lines for project approval, funding and staffing."

One emerging management practice, if more widely adopted, would reduce the "costly and time consuming" difficulties around preserving deep smarts in organizations.

Rather than relying only on private, one-to-one transmission of the information using an apprenticeship model, organizational leaders should insist on and practice greater transparency in management decision making. Management can then see and hear exactly what is considered as a decision is processed, and it becomes part of the everyday practice of running the business, not an "outside-my-real-job" added responsibility to coach and educate others.

In our age of escalating complexity in business (and government, religious organizations, even the military), transparency is vastly under-practiced, with the many dire consequences we've seen of late. With expertise more widely distributed than ever, such overt sharing of information certainly helps each member improve their "deep smarts." Explicitly being transparent in decision processes yields other benefits as well—better decisions will result as all are more fully engaged.

One current definition of transparency is offered on the Wikipedia site: "In sociology, politics, ethics, law, economics, business, management, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is freely available."

Practically speaking, this means leadership groups must improve their ability to speak clearly and openly about their thoughts, considerations, knowledge, and concerns (even their private internal judgments) with one another. In their book Power Up (Wiley, 1998), professors David Bradford (Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Allan Cohen (Babson College) describe an approach of "shared responsibility leadership" which is in part predicated on a leadership team's ability to use relatively more transparent processes. One major benefit? Exactly the kind of transmission of "deep smarts" that Jim Heskett describes.

Sharon L. Richmond
President
Richmond & Associates

The group/organization/enterprise may have to make a proactive effort to change to change/adjust some of its cultural norms.