When people talk about cultures, it is often in regards to the greater cultures of our world. For instance, America has a specific culture (arguably many), or China has their specific culture, or England’s culture is stodgy and paranoid, etc. However, what I think few people truly understand, is that cultures develop and are created in the smallest subsets of human populations. A great example is a company. A company, or corporation, is an entity itself. An entity made up of many individuals, with many different value systems, belief structures, and sometimes conflicting biases and behavior patterns. But the results of those interactions between individuals, whether good or bad, end with the result of the corporate entity’s culture, and in the end, its underlying identity.
A company can consist of many hundreds of people, from different countries, locations, cities, languages, cultures, and these people will interact and interrelate based on the preexisting corporate culture, if it exists, and if they have been properly indoctrinated. The greater corporate culture will help the individual transcend their own biases, and assist the individual in viewing the issues facing the organization through the common value filter of the corporation. This value filter is the lens by which all the parts and pieces of the corporate culture view the day-to-day events. Sometimes, cultures can fracture and split in an organization, creating subcultures that relate to the greater value system, but steep in their own flavor of culture all the same. Sometimes, it is beneficial, but most times, it is not.
The fracture in culture can occur due to a number of reasons. Changes in the corporate value system, in the management vision, acquisitions, buyouts, takeovers, financial woes… any number of threats can shatter a corporate culture into smaller pieces of the whole. Without a strong culture already in place when a change occurs, the resulting subcultures will drift farther and farther away from each other.
And the horrible thing about fixing culture issues is the massive amount of time and money it requires to build a positive affirming healthy culture. It costs a fortune… in both human and monetary costs, but the result is far too important to the long term success of the company for it to be ignored.
I have been on the front lines of one of the most varied culture shifts one could imagine. It is almost to epic proportions, and the funny thing is that hardly anyone notices. It is unseen and unspoken, yet it affects everything we try to do as a corporation. Far too often the blame lands on a process, or a person, or a team, and never on the underlying aspects of what actually caused the issue in the first place… the fracture of corporate culture. And more often than not at my company, Information Systems is the scapegoat.
Information Systems really has its finger on the pulse of the organization. I think from an operations standpoint, IS can feel the push and sway of forces within the organization faster than most, if not all, of the executive team. (And sadly, the IS reporting structure is removed from the executive team altogether. The general manager of IS in our company has always reported to someone else besides the CEO. Now that we are a private organization, you would think things would change. But unfortunately, that is not the case. At least not yet. Time will tell. But back to the culture problem.)
Since IS can feel these competing forces within the organization quickly, we often bear the brunt of the associated pain or conflict that results form these forces colliding. The company has unfortunately seen three mergers, two buyouts, and recent acquisition, so you can imagine the culture issues that have resulted. The company started off as a engineering group of a regulated power utility company in Texas. Just a subset of engineers, drafters, and a handful of support personnel really, not much of a company. But the utility thought it would be in their best interest to spin this group off into its own entity and focus instead on their own core business. The subsidiary that was created was the first and oldest office of the company. They did things how any small business would… just survive and make things work. They still were owned by the parent Utility, but could now perform work for other companies as well.
Fast forward a decade or so and the Utility parent company starts looking for opportunities to grow within a quickly deregulated industry, the first opportunity is to merge with a power company in Colorado. A power company that has had an engineering group of its own for quite a while. A group that has had plenty of time to forge their own value systems, their own way of doing things, their own processes and procedures, the whole gambit. And all of a sudden, they are now a branch office of a company in Texas.
At this point, a smart company would start a violent and massive indoctrination process to start flexing and changing the culture and values and processes, etc. But does it happen at this engineering company?
Not at all.
Because the pre-existing office in Texas is a family oriented culture. A focus on the hometown, the small town way of life, the value is in the personal relationships within the office. An island of sorts, isolated unto themselves. Because of this, the resulting branch office from the merger, looks inward as well. They put up the proverbial walls, sound their trumpets, and decide to keep doing things the way they were doing it before. And the office managers are given that leeway by the management (big mistake). So now, you have one company, one brand, one market presence and face to customers, and two different ways to do everything.
A few years later, and it all happens again. This time the merger is between the existing parent Utility and a utility in Minneapolis (who by the way, have their own engineering group). And without much ado, the company now has a branch office in Minneapolis. The result is that there is now three different ways of doing things. Three islands with different approaches to the same problems. By this point, technology has started to rapidly become a larger part of the company. The internet has started to grow rapidly, the need for cross office technology products is becoming apparent. The kicker is that the largest group of IS personnel is in Texas.
Can you see where this is going?
The Texas IS group wants to standardize, have a common IS infrastructure, etc. Can they do it? Not really, because that would be the “Texas way” of doing things, which completely violates the existing corporate cultures in the other two offices. So the only answer, like all the other groups and processes in the company, is separate, slightly linked, Information Systems groups. Separate servers, separate staff, separate processes and procedures across the board. This all goes to reinforcing the island mentality. The “Colorado way”, the “Texas way”, and the “Minneapolis way” are all in direct competition now. The executive team knows it, but again, is either too weak to change things, or just not getting it. They continue to give the leeway to the office general managers to continue “their way” of making money. Whatever it takes, long term results be damned.
Executives come and go. And my company is no different. After that merger, the executive board of the company was headed by a charismatic Enron type that felt it would be best for the us to grow via small company buyouts… and then he went on a spending spree. He bought a company in Nebraska and a company in Connecticut. Two separate entities, and again, with their own way of doing things. And who is asked to task the integration of these two new offices? Well IS of course.
And of course, these two companies have their own cultures, their own way of doing things. They are labeled slightly different in “their way”, instead of the “Nebraska way”, it is the “Company X Way”. Now that they are Company Y, that fact does not matter, because the Company X way is the way they have been making money and that is the way it must continue. No cross integration, no indoctrination, no effort expended to develop a common culture, or a common identity.
So people cling to what they know. And a company that started as a single office in Texas now has to wrestle with the fact that there is five offices, and five ways of doing things. Not just in Information Systems, but in every aspect. The only method that is consistent is the the Finance piece. Everyone uses the same Accounting system. Whoop-de-doo.
And just about three years ago (sounds like a while, but it is not), the company and its pieces were sold by the parent Utility to a construction company. The new parent company is privately owned, big, and very dedicated to their way of doing things, which is a good thing. But to push that culture down is going to take a monumental effort, and I sure haven’t seen it yet down in the trenches. And again, IS is in the middle of it, being asked to fix problems that can’t really be fixed because one answer is going to piss off four others. IS is in the middle of it, but not being recognized as being in the middle of it. We are the unvalued experts, so to speak, and not of direct thought or concern to the executive staff until after the shit hits the fan.
Until the culture of islands is recognized by not only the executives, but the general managers, and the management at all levels, things will not improve. Things will not change. Because recognizing that you are in a culture battle is the first step in fixing the culture problem, and thereby taking the first step in fixing the process and procedure issues that everyone thinks are the problem, when in reality, they are not. Information Systems, meanwhile, has to try its best to maintain an environment that we recognize as being diverse and varied, but do what we can to standardize.
Remember that thing I mentioned about IS having its finger on the pulse of the company? Right after the acquisition of our company by the construction company, we recognized that we as an IS organization could not effectively support the company as a single entity in our current form. So we reorganized into a centralized corporate entity supporting the company as a whole and not as islands. So far, we have made some great strides in standardizing and unifying, but only to a point. Since we can’t change the underlying business functions of the offices, we can’t change many of the things that affect us… we can’t proactively fix an issue if that is the “way” the office does it. Instead, we have to address it after the fact and hope to encourage a behavior or process change that is closer to the global whole.
And that is a massive pain in the butt.
Now, our company is about to undergo a corporate re-org. A change that IS effectively saw almost two years ago, a change that we already made, and something that we are working daily on improving. Hopefully we can get the corporation to catch up to where we are, so we can better support the business plan to our full extent. Hopefully those first glimmers of culture change are about to happen. Perhaps.
Time will tell. But the microcosms of culture tend to be self-reinforcing and very protective of themselves. I think if things change for the better, there will have to be pain involved. Because people will have to change. They will have to abandon their “way” and work towards the new unified way. The company can no longer be adrift as their own islands… it will only cause the company to sink.
And with that kind of motivation, things might just change.
