Our Adoption Series continues by trying to answer the following question:
Does corporate culture impact user adoption of technology? If so, how?
by describing and then analyzing the performance of two arch rival corporations.
In our last article, we introduced you to the highly-disciplined procurement department of a very large company (which we refer to as “Company #1”) with a top-down and authoritative management style and a belief that results are process-driven. Today we will introduce its nemesis (Company #2).
Company #2
If Company #1 did not exist, many would consider Company #2 to be one of the best-run companies in the world; but, as it stands, Company #1 is the clear leader in its industry. As the frequent “also-ran” in comparisons, Company #2 had developed a significant inferiority complex – like those often ascribed to the middle children of a family – where the company could not fully celebrate its often large and significant successes, choosing instead to anguish over the gaps (sometimes real, sometimes perceived) between it and its chief rival. This led to a culture of constant self-evaluation which manifested itself in an intensive benchmarking environment and the liberal use of third-party experts/consultants to weigh in on both performance and quality improvement.
Like its larger and more profitable rival, Company #2 had a strong process focus and tremendous resources to invest in process training for its staff. Where Company #2 differed from Company #1 was in its approach to process and process rigor. Specifically, Company #2 had developed a single over-arching (or general) process flow that it applied to all processes and to all projects. (Company #1 utilized different strategies and models for different process types). Company #2 believes that there is a single set of “value drivers” that can be applied to every process – by maintaining a high degree of rigor and focus in how those value drivers are established and leveraged, the company can understand the best way to improve processes and maximize results. Additionally, the company believed that if every employee understood the over-arching process and the principles behind it, extraordinary synergies could be achieved across the entire company. This single unifying process had been developed during a large multi-year, company-wide quality improvement program.
The quality program, that had ended several years before I became involved with them, had helped Company #2 improve its overall product and service quality. But, the executive team felt that the program had failed to deliver truly transformational results. As a result, the company began a very deliberate campaign to change its culture and move away from one where leadership and communication drove behavior to an environment that focused on ‘influencing’ staff behavior. The view this company took was that the only way to actually change a company, was to take a bottom’s up approach and encourage the staff to ‘do the right thing.’ The company invested significant resources to identify which staff activity drivers were critical to performance results and then began a global campaign to encourage employees to perform those critical activities. It believed that if it could show employees the “value” of adopting new processes and technologies, staff would willingly choose to adopt them.
The procurement department at Company #2 was led by a very well-regarded Chief Procurement Officer who had joined the company after a career in another industry. The department was divided into three large groups and the CPO gave managerial responsibility for each group to one of his direct reports. With many large acquisitions over the preceding decade, the company’s procurement team was not truly centralized; the CPO hoped to use its new supply management technology suite as the honey to draw the procurement bees into a new centralized hub.
Next time, we’ll return with a detailed comparison between the cultures of Company #1 and Company #2 and analyze the impact of their specific corporate cultures on technology adoption.