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.