Thomas Otter

(Photo from the cc stream of Steve Webel, thanks)

Andrew McAfee  recently blogged about airline queuing systems and IT. The post is well worth reading, and it got me thinking about HR systems. My blogging history is largely made up of looking for obscure metaphors and applying them to HR technology.

An old Chinese saying about the power of regional bureaucrats holds that "The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away." If remote locations, for whatever reason, don’t want to follow new orders from a central authority, there have historically been few good tools available to enforce compliance. In the era of the Internet and enterprise IT, the situation is very different. Some types of new order can be embedded in information technology so that they’re faithfully followed. Orders from headquarters that can’t be backed up with technology, meanwhile, diffuse slowly and with low fidelity, as the example of PriorityAAcesss boarding so far shows.

Andrew also notes.

One of modern IT’s most underappreciated roles is as an enforcer of process discipline. Today’s enterprise systems make sure that complex, multi-step processes –  ones that involve employees, customers, suppliers, and other groups—are executed the same way time after time, location after location, with few or no exceptions.

IT systems like ERP only really work well when organisation standardize processes. As Andrew argues elsewhere that this is the where the big productivity ROI comes from.

The challenge is that people in subsidiaries don’t always welcome being standardized, especially when they are used to doing things their own way.

Many global systems fail, not because they fail to meet global needs, but because they don’t do anything to help the subsidiary. When designing systems always ask yourself "what’s in it for the people entering the data?" If  there isn’t a whole lot of value accruing to them, then they won’t willingly use the system. It sounds obvious, but it is the failing of many a global succession planning system. For subscribers, I go into more detail here.