Surprise! IS alignment, informal structure does work too!

I am Chinese. Undeniably, I shared the common culture values with my compatriots. Even though I was brought up under colonial rule, I was born to be thinking in holistic and contextual way. So, no surprise, if I naturally equally weighted IS strategic alignment and structural alignment for any company, many of my fellow classmates would agree with me. I basically believe a proper formal IS structure is a prerequisite of success. It is a bit Confucian style.

However, research study and experiences told me that informal structure did work too. Dr. Yolande E. Chan (2002) of Queen’s University finds a strong trend that IS strategic alignment may be more important than the alignment of formal business units and IS structures. Comparing with strategic alignment, fewer preconditions to IS structural alignment were always present.

The argument put forward by Dr. Yolande seems quite strong when I search my memory. There was no CTO in the ecommerce project I had worked for. A consultant, a close friend of CEO, took in charge of whole group IT/IS strategy. The empowerment of the consultant is not merely coming from his relationship with CEO but also his extraordinary performance in the IT field and business sense. His name was never shown in the organizational structure. However, he acted proactively in interacting with all business units within the company and aligned IS strategy with a clear business direction especially in outsourcing IT works strategically. When the time we were encountering trust problem in virtual team working, he dedicated his fervor in lining up distributed teams and building up personal trust relationships among IS personnel. So, IS personnel were all clear about their roles.

Honestly speaking, sometimes, I felt a bit puzzle about how a guy without proper position in a company could get through hurdles, especially when confronting COO and CFO. A success from IS strategic alignment may help to explain most. Culturally, I still doubt about that sort of structure. Practically, I learnt from that.

Reference:

“Why haven’t we mastered alignment? The importance of the informal organization structure”, Dr. Yolande E. Chan from Queen’s University (2002).

When a CFO met an IS change ... Empowerment or enslavement?

Searching within my brain for days, I felt a bit exhausted in finding a happy story about decision style with an IS aspect. Sorry, no other choice. I am going to share with you another sad story about how a CFO tackled with an IS change. I will then discuss about empowerment-enslavement issue.

It was about late 2005. Our CEO made an off-the-hook order to terminate our relationship with our ecommerce partner, an e-platform provider, within 1-year time. We had to switch to a new partner’s system as soon as possible. CEO set the account and accounting modules on the utmost priority. He then tasked our CFO to host that special project and detail CFO’s requirement to IT team.

Our CFO was in his early fifty and still looked young at that moment. However, his decision style was nothing but directive. Under the original .NET system, despite his reluctance, he could barely generate 5 so-call accounting reports from the crystal report system. (In my opinion, I regarded this system as DSS since those report formats were quite primitive. It was not for dummies to digest.) He was satisfied with those reports because he claimed he had already managed the internal auditor from our mother company with them.

We made attempts to explain to him that the logic of data extraction was totally different from the previous one. Our new partner tried to invite our CFO to go to their home site and show him how the new system complied with the generally accepted accounting principles. Nevertheless, our CFO insisted his requirement had already been made clear ever since he sent out the 5 report formats. He would not change his accounting principle. Discussion came to a deadlock after half a year. At last, our CEO interfered and a new CFO took in charge of that issue in a different way.

I am not going to blame our CFO since our culture may almost explain why he behaved like that. “While empowering involves giving power to individual, enslaving suggests not removing power (which is disempowerment), but rather removing the choice of how to behave. (Davison and Martinsons 2002)” Our CFO was enslaved by the original system.

High Power Distance (PDI) cultures (Hong Kong is considered high) will be comparatively more likely to maintain the status quo and will be less likely to incorporate clean-slate thinking into their IT-enabled business process change efforts than low PDI. (Martinsons and Davison 2000) This explains why our CFO tried to avoid uncertainty.

I hope all Hong Kong managers should keep that in mind. “Empowerment or enslavement?” is a good and interesting article to go through. I hope all of our classmates will take a look.

A real case about Virtual Team – trust and conflict

To conclude my 3-year virtual team experience, I would like to tell you that it is really easy to establish but hard to manage. It is all about personal relationship and trust.

Giddens (1990: 34) defines trust as "confidence in the reality of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events …" Although this definition is still not universally accepted by scholars, I do agree with it.

In 2005, my company decided to set up a Joint Venture with a Malaysia based company and entered a fast-moving ecommerce industry. The venture capital was around 200M HK dollars. With the formation of this company, we have teams widely distributed throughout Asia, including HK, KL, TW, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Macua, Beijing, Dailian, Chengdu.

Taking an agile and prompt approach, the new JV deliberately just set up a company hierarchy structure and left all the other teams in virtual team. Both side agreed to contribute all their resources wherever/whenever any request were made from virtual teams.

The new JV then operated in virtual mode. For top management, we spent around 1 million to set up a dedicated video conference line between Hong Kong and Malaysia and agreed to meet virtually twice a month. To make progress, we set up project group to implement all orders from top management. For lower level working teams, like IT team, they pooled their all software and hardware elites to form a group and try to establish a groundbreaking system to reshuffle the market. Market know-how and technical know-how were required to be transferred from Malaysia team to China team.

The whole project was in a state of chaos three months later. IT virtual group members found themselves totally not in sync either technically or personally (even though they are all Chinese). From the technical aspect, their skill set differences were huge where some were .NET experts, some were Java-based, and Malaysia team knew PHP/MySQL/AJAX only. Some of the China team even felt as if they never joined the new JV since they were still paid by the original company and reported to the original boss daily. They never listened to the virtual team leader from other side. On the other hand, the Malaysian team was reluctant to transfer their know-how.

For the top management team, the project team could not make any progress. Key persons were often missed in video conferences. Even the CEO, from Malaysia side, sometimes hid himself behind the screen while having video conference. (We learnt the reason later on. The CEO found himself in a difficult situation since the order from his boss was not in line with JV direction.)

We then spent almost a year to build up personal trust relationship among the top management team by irregular face-to-face beer gatherings and sent key guys physically to lead the China team (of course, invoked power struggle). Eventually, the project started kicking off.

I won't go further with my case. All I want to point out is no matter the trust is based on abstract systems or persons it would probably take you a long period for (virtual) team integration. Mind your own schedule!

Here, I would like to share the model advocated by Nandakumar and Baskerville 2001 on operation of trust relationships on the internet-mediated virtual teamworking. It really may help you if you are building a virtual team. (please click to get a larger photo)

Concerns for your “ebusiness” in China

A day after our MIS seminar on the Ecommerce topic, I was in Hang Zhou for my holidays. You may think I am crazy if I bring along with my notebook and update my blog while having my holidays. Yes, but merely not for this course. I never travel without my notebook.

“Travelling in China with notebook connected on the net” is an extremely dangerous thing. Yes, it is still a truth. Usually, I only get my network card plugged when I need it. I used SSLVPN on top of hotel’s internet connection. I never left any critical/business related information in my notebook. That is my normal practice.

Am I over concerned? Well ...

You may say “No Surprise” to find the website of “Hong Kong Jockey Club” being blocked in China simply because it is a gambling site. How about Macauslot.com? I can access it freely when I am in China. Why?

Furthermore, you may be very surprised to find that you can access yahoo.com but NOT hk.yahoo.com. You even can’t use the dictionary function in hk.yahoo.com. If you are naïve enough to think that you can start your e-business in greater China on top of HK Yahoo’s shopping mall, then you are really making some BIG.

Xanga? No way. You can’t access it.

NOT A SECRET. My company did spend money in the past 3 years to monitor if our domain names were being blocked by China or local authorities in China. We learnt that some of our competitors experienced sort of blocking in terms of months, days or hours of time. The reasons behind may be varied a lot and can be very complex. Political, economical, social are the most common ones. However, most of them may be related to GuanXi. Especially, if your e-business is in certain way touching grey areas (unclear in laws and uncertain in law enforcement), you have to be very cautious and careful in handling them; otherwise, you may find your company suddenly being fined heavily for one day.

Oh! My Internet memories ...

NO Surprise! It was 1992 that I firstly subsribed internet services from pacific internet (formerly called SuperNet).

At that moment, we were using 2.8K modem to surf on the net. I loved using Terminal to telnet to all those private BBS and read those newsgroups.

Not until I joined HK Telecom in 1996, we started to use 33.6K modem. I remembered I had to use a textpad to key in all those HTML tags manually. My stupid colleague always typed in wrong tags and cried for help. Ha ha ... I had to make every graphics carefully so that our "metagateway" (main content) would not be too slow for browsing. So funny.

Before long, short-lived 56K was born just before the introduction of 1.5Mps. Then, we had iTV, broadband video portal ... all just omens betided a blast of IT boom.

Web 1.0 was a tragedy. Web 2.0 was an interlude. How about Web 3.0? Would it be a soap opera? Where will I be at that moment?