Notes on “Practice Makes Process”

Prepared by Ariadna73 Page 1 of 3

Reference Brown, J., et. al. (2000). "Practice Makes Process" Chapter 4 in The Social Life of Information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press

IT development and economy crashes in the world were making business very difficult, so management people started to run in circles trying to do miracles

They started to regard processes as the most important thing in a company The "invented" Business Process Reengineering

It focused in the company's processes It seemed to work very well

• The most impressive results come from narrow band of operations such as shipping, warehousing and billing

Work processes are well defined Inputs and outputs are clearly measurable • With regard to information, reengineering directs attention to information flows

But this leads to tunnel vision It is less successful in the parts of the organization that are less linear, such as management

But critics of Reengineering had a lot of observations Just a beautiful name for "downsizing" Pernicious, Costly panacea Obsession with technology It forgets the meaning and favors the ends

• The meaning is important, but reengineering focuses in processes and forgets the meaning

• To do their job, processors need to be able to make sense of what they do o They need to understand what they do o Not only justify it ("because the boss says so")

• It is important to pay attention to the practice, that is: the activity involved in getting the work done

To be successful, we really need to "look the other way" instead of the way reengineering looks • When looking at meaning, we are looking in a different way than when looking at

processes o People naturally find their meaning in what their peers do o This is a problem for reengineering for several reasons

Reengineering is somewhat monotheistic, and doesn't support people looking at their sides

It tends to be top-down The top-down view tends to take the blood out of the business. People are used as

pieces in a puzzle Business process reengineers tend to discourage the side by side search for meaning

o Focusing on individuals, process accounts overlook social resources that people in similar occupations provide one another

• This makes it difficult for business process reengineering to deal with practice

Notes on “Practice Makes Process”

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Example: The Xerox Technical representatives Representing process

This is a study conducted by Julian Orr The company created a "map", a manual to repair work with directions for the

representatives

Understanding practice The map was not helpful. Reality was a mess, and the machines always behaved oddly.

(not surprisingly for copiers and printers!) The other problem with the map is that it told the reps what to do, but not why, and that

rendered them also unusable The reps needed to make sense of the machine in order to repair it. The maps were

useless, and they decided to go to breakfast instead of reading endless manuals

When the going gets though The reps socialized a lot, at mealtimes and in other spaces Those chats helped them learn how to do their work better However, not all problems can be solved over breakfast

The practice in the process

Collaboration • Two reps started to work together in one machine that was having an odd behavior • They also shared their recently acquired knowledge with the group, and the group also

helped them • But collective knowledge is more than the sum of its parts

Narration

• The reps are constantly telling stories • Stories can be means to discover something completely new about the world • But beyond sharing information, the reps were building a common framework that

allowed them to interpret the information they received in a common light

Improvisation • This is a tool to close the gap between reality and the manual • For example, knowing what checkboxes fill out in a form so they ring a bell in the

appropriate department

Notes on “Practice Makes Process”

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Processing Standard outputs routines are the key to process improvement and coordination But improvisation is also important to adapt, so the business needs a balance between the

two. Process serve as screens to hide what people really do behind what they say they do, so they

can carry on their jobs in a real world

Lateral thrust People rely heavily on lateral ties to overcome the limits of the process-based information In Xerox, for example, they decided to provide reps with two way radios, so they could

continue talking to their peers Xerox also created a Knowledge database that ultimately saved the company up to $100M

Beyond either/or

Although this paper favors practice over process, the reality is that we need to find a balance between the two

The danger of practice is that it can grow too independently and become too loosely coupled to the organization (lack of cohesion)

The challenges for maintaining the balance are not only information, but also challenges of organization, knowledge and innovation