The importance of understanding corporate culture

Corporate culture can be formalised, or it can be “this is the way things are done here” lore that defines how people act, react, make decisions, and deal with problems. The impact of corporate culture on a business can be significant to the way that corporate culture in IT projects (and business as usual) are implemented, and for a consultant, the importance of understanding corporate culture can be critical to the success of a project. Corporate Culture can be driven from the top, with clear leadership in how the business should operate (not just to deliver wealth to stockholders), or in the absence of strong leadership it can be driven by great employees. However, poor culture – or a weak culture – can spread negativity and drag down the adoption of change, a project, or even the whole business.

A fish will rot from it’s head – leadership can spread negativity and poor culture, but also if the whole fish is diseased, a strong head cannot make it live.

The Importance of Understanding Corporate Culture

As I consult with businesses on their strategy, change, transformation or project implementation – I need to understand the corporate culture and how it will affect my engagement. How will the staff react to the change? Will the stakeholders support the transformation? What will it take for the project to be successfully adopted?

Examples of cultural impacts

I do work for both small and large private businesses, family business and governments. Some of the impacts that I have encountered (either directly or indirectly) include;

• Onerous process – such as a multi-stage approval process for any change, particularly when there are people involved in the process who either don’t know anything about what they are approving, or simply don’t care.
  • An IT manager told me that he would have to approve building enhancements or purchase of new property (land and buildings), and that he deliberately sat on the approval for as long as possible, and then simply approved them all without reading.
• Ineffective or absent training or induction – such as staff who are responsible for an activity, taking over from someone else who did not get training on the activity.
• Paper-focused process – such as rejecting an email to ask for office supplies, with the response that a form must be downloaded, filled in by hand and then faxed to the same person that the email was sent to.
  • In this example, the office manager simply stated that the request form was “on the SharePoint site”, with no link, and when the form was located, it simply asked for exactly the same information that was originally in the email
• An adherence to management approval for all activities
  • When deploying Skype for Business to a widely-dispersed organisation with small branch offices, many older team leaders at those locations thought that Instant Messaging was a distraction and not professional communication, so instructed their team to log out of Skype every day.
  • In another company, staff refused to start using a new system, because their departmental director was on leave and so had not given the managers or staff specific direction to start using the new product.
  • Toshiba was rocked by an accounting scandal that was rooted in staff following management direction to delay reporting losses, and moving costs in to other years.
• Sunk cost and chasing technology debt – we invested millions in the hardware and software 10 years ago, so we need to keep using it.
• Fiefdoms, silos, stovepipes, islands, and territories – where departments and teams compete with each other, don’t have a trust relationship, and won’t share information. Knowledge is locked away, protected, and never shared.
  • Amazingly common – and a complete disaster for Office 365 and collaboration tools.
  • Another common example of this is when each department must contribute part of their budget to a large, shared, transformational project.
• The IT department as the police – the SOE (Standard Operating Environment – the pre-configured installation of Windows on everyone’s computer), and the firewall/reverse proxy are based on heavy restrictions to prevent installation of software, lock down access, and have a focus on blocking as much as possible.
  • With SaaS and Office 365, access to many Internet sites are required. In one company, they had blocked access to live.com and personal OneDrive – which was actually required for Office 365 to work. That was a battle for us to convince them to remove the sites from the blacklist!
  • Many {poorly} written plugins and components require the user to have administrative rights, or even just installation rights. There are many other rights that some applications need, that IT departments often block because they think it needs to be done (or was needed in the past).
  • I had a weird one, where the time synchronisation of some workstations was off – but the user did not have the rights to change it, and this caused a problem with login to a Kerberos based system.
• Clock off culture – where staff will only do exactly what they “must” do each day, follow their job description (that was written 15 years ago, before they were hired, and cannot be changed), and the staff are un-motivated to do anything that makes them even be thinking about work after 5:01.
  • I went to the on-site datacentre at 4:55, came back to my desk to find the entire IT department deserted, lights off and doors locked at 5:11. Do these people want work from home flexibility? No. Do they want the ability to buy their own computer for work? No BYOD for them…
  • Lack of motivation to engage and contribute innovatively can be a challenging effort – particularly when the solution to their monotony and problems is a technology or approach that they are resisting.

What makes a corporate culture “good”?

A successful corporate culture must;

1. Focus on customers, then employees, and then investors – start with Why your business exists
2. Be adaptable to change – in market, in technology, with legislation and regulation
3. Embrace change to culture and the corporate environment

The impact of corporate culture in IT projects

I have said it many times, but the success of a technology implementation is not tied only to the technology. Understanding the current corporate culture, and adjusting the project implementation accordingly, is fundamental to success.