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Performance Pointers Archives

Adopting Content Management inevitably changes the corporate culture'

CM systems deal with information - creating it, reviewing it, collecting it, distributing it. The conjunction of information-hungry customers and information-rich organizations increases the demand for better, more timely, more personalized, more relevant information. The old ‘manufacturing’ model - already under considerable pressure - is being replaced by the ‘information’ model.

As a consequence, the way companies think about employees has to change; the concept of the interchangeable - and easily replaceable - ‘assembly line worker’ is gradually morphing into the highly knowledgeable and difficult to replace ‘information worker’ - even in classical manufacturing environments. As the understanding grows that people make decisions rather than things, the value of the embedded knowledge within workers inevitably will change the employer-employee relationship. 

Already demographics and outdated HR practices are causing tremendous retention and staffing challenges. As people leave the organization, or take on new tasks within the company, they take increasingly sophisticated - and not easily reproducible - embedded knowledge and information about their work with them.

Trying to capture that knowledge using conventional means; written procedures, stored in a database, supposedly accessible for all staff, is proving to be nearly impossible. In part this is because “people don’t know what they know, until they need to know it”. Put in other words: knowledge is contextual, and there is in my opinion only one way to capture that knowledge - through contextual narrative.

So how does this relate to Content Management (systems) and corporate culture? Since one of the tangential uses for the information stored in a content management system is internal, to make the information available for use in customer service departments and technical support departments, capturing ‘more than the facts’ becomes critical.

There’s no avoiding impacting the corporate culture. Let me give you an example: How can you expect people to develop new ways to collaborate when you keep them ‘locked away’ in separate, cubicle-heavy silos? Only letting them out for an occasional ‘project team meeting’? Cubicle culture has to go - and not a moment too soon. If we want and need people to collaborate, we’re going to have to physically house them in a shared open, accessible, work area.

If you need people to think outside of the box, you can’t keep them contained in one.

If you have geographically dispersed teams, give them virtual collaborative tools and spaces. It is also apparent to me, that you can’t foster cross-functional collaboration, if you try to maintain a subtle, but rigid unofficial caste system, where the opinion of an engineer is valued more highly than that of a writer.

In fact, both opinions are equally valid, because they are reached from different perspectives. Information is multifaceted precisely because information only acquires meaning from within a context. When the information we receive matches a pattern imprinted on our brains, then - and only then - can we make decisions. This is the crux of multi-disciplinary collaboration: that each perspective is valid in its own right, and that the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. Information has to matter, to be effective. To whom must information matter? To the creators of it, but more so even to the consumers of it.

When we consider that sharing information freely within the organization is a requirement for effectie collaboration, it should become clear that doing so will be a major culture shift for most organizations. And with such a major cultural shift comes territorialism, the desire to retain privileges, the reluctance to share for fear of being made redundant, the myopia of uninspired leaders, and so forth.

Managing and overcoming these and other effects of a cultural shift are also the reason that support and sponsorship for adopting content management must come from the very top of the organization. I’ve written about the role of the executive before, and I cannot stress the importance of executive support - beyond the allocation of funds - enough.

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