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Quadrant charts (multidimensional scaling in two dimensions if you want to get all technical about it) are handy tools for visualizing patterns in data. They’re especially handy for oversimplifying complex situations, as several of you pointed out in response to last week’s column on determining which employee roles most and least lend themselves to remote work. Check out the comments: Where your desk should be – IS Survivor Publishing and scroll to the bottom.

And make no mistake about it. My quadrant-oriented analysis, based on the importance of process management and strong interpersonal relationships – was seriously oversimplified. To help de-over-simplify it, here are a few additional random thoughts and comments:

Pre-existing relationships: If relationship building drives the need for a role to be performed on-premises, why should teams that have already formed (and stormed, and normed) have to commute to their on-premises cubicles?

Answer: For pre-established teams, on-site face-to-face interactions might not matter, at least, not at first. But teams aren’t static entities. Over time, some members might “call in rich,” transfer to a different team, or be promoted to a different role. Meanwhile, new members might join and need integration into team functioning. Just my opinion: There isn’t yet a technological substitute for the chemistry of in-person team interaction for building the trust and shared understandings required for maximum team effectiveness.

We can’t be face-to-face anyway: In international enterprises, teams are often composed of members scattered across all latitudes and longitudes (well, maybe not all – few businesses employee Antarcticans or, for that matter, Guamians, but you get the idea). Bringing teams physically together can be too expensive, and the logistics too complicated to be practical.

It’s a key factor in the ability of SMBs (small-to-medium-size businesses) to compete with their larger competitors: They have the advantage of operating out of a single location, with no concerns about what, in an earlier column, I called the “soft bigotry of time zones” and the “softer bigotry of accents.” Cohesion is, in relative terms, easy.

It’s a competitive advantage because SMBs can, for the most part, bring team members together as needed, achieving alignment and trust more quickly and easily through proximity and similarity.

But this isn’t an unmixed blessing. SMBs often suffer from the disadvantage of excessive sameness. When everyone looks and largely thinks alike, “out-of-the-box thinking” and “not-in-the-company thinking” are the same.

Especially, SMB decision-makers are more prone than their larger competitors to assume their customers are just like them.

International or multinational/global businesses face the challenge of achieving the trust and alignment that happen naturally in an SMB, substituting sophistication in the use of collaboration technologies for the simplicity of physical presence.

SMBs face the obverse challenge.

Power: Employers are accustomed to having it; employees are accustomed to … well, to employers having it. But right now (nobody knows how long it will last), good employees are hard to find and know they have some leverage. So an employee’s preference for working remotely can’t just be written off as “That’s why they call it work.”

It’s akin to the early days of unionization. Employers then had to face the jarring realization that they couldn’t just call the shots anymore. Employees could and did negotiate with management from a position of significant strength.

Perhaps there are insights to be gleaned from this history.

Culture: Culture inflates the team-level characteristics of trust and alignment to enterprise scale.

Culture is far too big a subject to squeeze into a space this small. For today, consider that culture is, for the most part, a reflection of leader behavior. In on-premises SMBs the reflection is a high-fidelity image. The larger and more dispersed the organization, the more it’s like what you’d see in a fun-house mirror.

Bob’s last word: If achieving trust and alignment at a team level is hard when interactions are limited to what collaboration technologies allow, promoting a company-wide culture in a large, dispersed enterprise is orders of magnitude harder.

And yet, without a healthy and cohesive culture, leaders might as well relegate themselves to an operating model in which workgroups, departments, and divisions interact as if they’re all outsourcers, delivering their work products to their (gawd) “internal customers’” inputs while negotiating service level agreements that look a lot like arm’s length contracts.

Bob’s sales pitch: My ManagementSpeak cupboard is bare. Keep your ears open and send in your favorite euphemisms, obfuscations, and oxymorons. What you’ll get in return is the admiration of your fellow members of the KJR community (if I can attribute you as the source), or the secret satisfaction that comes from anonymity (if I can’t).

An ongoing debate fostered by Stewart Alsop rages over when we’ll unplug the last mainframe. (Does this mean there are debates alsoped by Ed Foster? Inquiring minds want to know.)

Back in the good old days, microcomputers processed eight bits, minicomputers sixteen, and mainframes thirty-two. Then progress happened. The laptop computer I’m using to write this column has more raw processing power, and even with lowly Windows/95 crashes less often than the IBM 360/158 I used in 1980.

Stewart has concluded we’ll never unplug the last mainframe. I’m forced to agree, because mainframe isn’t a class of technology, it’s a state of mind. The mainframe mentality – central control – has gained renewed popularity.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1980. Apple computer dominates the fledgling personal computer market with a 6502 microprocessor, a 40-column screen, and VisiCalc. Accountants flock to this puppy. Why? Because it makes them independent of Data Processing, that’s why.

Well, progress has overtaken us:

  • Various forms of .ini files have made it impossible for end-users to be self supporting, just as fuel injection spelled the end of home car care.
  • Local Area Networks means our formerly independent systems now plug into a shared resource, and we may even load software from central file servers.
  • Electronic Mail and shared directories mean we ship files back and forth, which in turn means we have to agree to common file formats.

Progress is just dandy. In this case it means more powerful systems that are easier to use and provide more value than ever before. The price?

The combination of interconnectedness and maintenance complexity has given central IS a logical reason to regain the control it lost when PCs hit their growth curve in the mid-1980s.

Many IS departments now forbid end-users from loading software into their PCs – only IS-approved standards may be used. That’s fine if IS has a standard – if your employer uses WordPerfect, why should you insist on using WordPro? – but it makes no sense when IS provides no tool and forces users to do without.

Another example of the trend: Not all that long ago, I heard several senior IS executives talk about the importance of getting control over all the “hidden code” that had come into being over the past ten years in their enterprises. The code in question? Formulas in spreadsheets.

Yes, these people seriously believed it would be in their companies’ best interests if IS gained control over the formulas embedded in the various and sundry spreadsheet models employees had created to help them do their jobs.

Why? Two reasons. First, some spreadsheets go into production, serving as crude database management systems that keep track of departmental information. Second, IS supposedly has a far better understanding of how to create consistent “business rules” in ways that encourage code re-use and logical consistency than the end-users who keep on re-inventing the wheel in the various spreadsheets they build.

While clearly absurd (why IS should have any more to say about the contents of an electronic spreadsheet than it does over one created with graph paper, pencils and calculators is beyond me) the trend back to central control is gaining force.

Yes, it’s absolutely true that end-users use spreadsheets to manage databases, using the wrong tool for the job and creating maintenance headaches downstream. I use a screwdriver to open paint cans, for that matter. There are no “Paint Can Tool Police” to stop me, and if I bend the screwdriver, that’s my business.

Duplication of effort is a price companies pay for empowered employees who act independently. Inconsistent spreadsheet formulas are simply the electronic consequence of diverse perspectives about the business.

And IS isn’t all that good at consistency. It manages multiple databases. Equivalent fields in different databases usually have different formats, inconsistent values, and often, subtle differences in the semantics of their definitions.

The personal computer was a key enabler of employee empowerment. Resist the trend back to mainframes. Give end-users as much freedom as you can.