ORGANISATIONS AND DEPENDABILITY 2

DR JOHN ROOKSBY

IN THIS LECTURE…

This lecture will focus on organisations. This will be a high level overview.

1. What are organisations?

2. Organisational structure

3. Change

4. Process, Practice and Management

5. Enterprises and Ecosystems

SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Software Engineering

Organisations

People and Processes

Communications + Data Management

Operating Systems

Equipment

ApplicationsSocio-TechnicalSystemsEngineering

Society

Failures, accidents and disasters often have underlying organisational causes and factors…

HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE

HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE

• A UK ferry capsizes shortly after departing Zeebrugge, killing 193 people. The bow doors remained open as it departed.

• UK Enquiry finds a disease of sloppiness and negligence at every level of the corporation's hierarchy

HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE

• The disaster was a key event leading to • The development of Corporate Manslaughter Laws in the

UK • The Public Interest Disclosure act (protection for

whistleblowers)

DEEPWATER HORIZONMACONDO INCIDENT (DEEPWATER HORIZON)

DEEPWATER HORIZONMACONDO INCIDENT (DEEPWATER HORIZON)

A rig exploded and sank, killing 11 and leading to one of the largest oil spills in history.

The US Government’s investigation concluded:

• Better management of decision-making processes within BP and other companies, better communication within and between BP and its contractors and effective training of key engineering and rig personnel would have prevented the Macondo incident.

DEEPWATER HORIZONMACONDO INCIDENT (DEEPWATER HORIZON)

The rig was operated within a complex organisational context:

• Commissioned by R&B Falcon which later became part of Transocean • Leased to BP from 2001 until September 2013. BP had grown rapidly

through a series of acquisitions and mergers. • Employees from several organisations were involved, inlcuding

Haliburton who were providing cement modelling services.• The rig was registered in the Marshall Islands, and regulated by the

Minerals Management Service (MMS)

• During and after the incident, these organisations appeared to try to shift blame to each other.

THE SHUTTLE DISASTERS

THE SHUTTLE DISASTERS

• The CAIB investigation into the Columbia shuttle disaster focused on:

a wide range of historical and organisational issues,

including political and budgetary considerations, compromises, and changing priorities over the life of the Space Shuttle Programme

THE SHUTTLE DISASTERS

• NASA is a large, complex organisation• The Shuttle programme also involved external organisations

• Managerial failings including a failure to share information, to take engineers seriously, to explore contingencies

• Communication problems and misunderstandings with external organisations

• A “faster, better, cheaper” strategy

• Columbia disaster reminiscent of challenger.• Other disasters such as the loss of the Mars Climate Obriter

also attributed to organisational problems.

BHOPAL GAS DISASTER

BHOPAL GAS DISASTER

In 1984, water was mixed with methyl isocyanate at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, resulting in the release of toxic gas. There were approximately 3000 deaths (in the short-term), and hundreds of thousands of injuries including blindness, kidney and liver failure.

According to Shrivastava [1] there were a series of organisational antecedents to the accident including poor training, poor motivation, poor manning, and low importance of the plant to its parent organisation

BHOPAL GAS DISASTEROngoing controversies on the immediate cause: how did water came to be mixed with methyl isocyanate? But there were clearly wider problems:• Storing chemicals in large tanks and filling beyond

recommended levels• Poor maintenance leading to failure of several safety systems.

Other safety systems being switched off to save money• Wider problems included growth of slums around the plant, a

lack of catastrophe plans, and lack of healthcare

Ongoing disputes over responsibility: a global organisation operating under different jurisdictions. Complex issues over ownership.

ORGANISATIONAL FAILINGSIn examples such as these we see factors including

• Communication failures

• Failures to coordinate and cooperate

• Failures in designing and maintaining equipment

• Failures to learn

• Prioritisation of cost over safety

• Failures of responsibility

• Regulatory failings

These are operational failures, but will have roots in organisational design and strategy

When we say there are organisational problems we are not talking specifically about the organisation as an entity but about organisation-in-action

WHAT IS AN ORGANISATION?Organisations are groups of people who distribute tasks for a collective goal.

• There are many definitions of organisation (including several legal definitions).

• However, our interest is not to look at ‘types’ of organisation, but to examine how organisational practice can be dependable.

• Our interest should be in how people work in an organisational, or institutional context

• Organisation should be treated as both a noun and a verb• Organisations should not be seen as entities but as arenas for

activity, and technologies not as artefacts but social objects in this

• Critical systems engineering is often interested in sociological and psychological views of work and organisations

ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTUREOrganisations are structured. They have a purposeful structure

• Contrast with unstructured collectives

• Contrast with self-structuring ecologies

There are many kinds of structure, but it is not my intention to covers these here.

Structure is normative, an ideal rather than a mirror.

• Practices will be constrained by and orient to the structure

• Practices will be dynamic

• So ecologies and collectives may be apparent within and across organisations (disorder will exist in order, and order in disorder)

Ministers and Home Office Board

Strategic Centre

Delivery Groups

Crime Reduction and Community Safety Group

Office for Security and

Counter Terrorism

Office for Criminal Justice

and Reform

Criminal Records Bureau

Delivery Agencies

UK Borders Agency

Identity and Passport Service

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Professional S

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Delivery Partners

Counter Terrorism Partners

NDPBs (e.g. Serious

Organised Crime Agency)

43 Police Forces

Local Partnerships

EXAMPLE: THE HOME OFFICE

STRUCTURE AND DEPENDABILITYSome evidence structure has an effect on dependability, e.g:

Complex and/or ambiguous structures

• Hinder decision making

• Can lead to an absence of responsibility

Control centric organisations

• Can lead to poor decision making (bottlenecks, remote)

• Have single point of failure

However, the problems do not lie purely in structure, but in the relation between structure and practice.

• Eg. Can decision-making be effectively migrated in a hierarchical organisation? Can decisions be negotiated in a horizontal one?

ORGANISATIONAL AND SOFTWARE STRUCTURE

The information technology used by an organisation often has a close relation with organisational structure

• IT is often deployed as a part of re-structuring efforts within organisations

• Many organisations seek to implement enterprise systems

• Enterprise does not necessarily mean organisation, but can refer to distinctive parts of an organisation, and to conglomerates of organisations.

• Generic, customisable systems are popular.

• These are not truly generic, but have an accrued functionality – they do not represent an ‘ideal’ organisation.

• Some evidence to show that the less customisation that takes place, the more successful a deployment will be [6]

SOFTWARE STRUCTURE AND ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTUREConway’s law: organizations that design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

• “if you have four teams working on a compiler, you’ll have a four pass compiler” (Eric Raymond).

• The quality of systems interfaces reflects the quality of organisational communication (e.g. Mars Orbiter crash)

• A study of Microsoft Vista [2] suggests organisational structure is a better predictor of the failure proneness of software than code-based metrics (churn, dependencies, test coverage, etc.).

• The more people who touch the code the lower the quality.• A large loss of team members affects the knowledge retention and thus quality.• The more edits to components the higher the instability and lower the quality.• The lower level is the ownership the better is the quality.• The more cohesive are the contributors (organizationally) the higher is the quality.• The more cohesive is the contributions (edits) the higher is the quality.• The more the diffused contribution to a binary the lower is the quality.• The more diffused the different organizations contributing code, the lower is the quality.

TESTING AND ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTUREAhonen [3] suggests organisational structure has significant influence on the quality of testing in an organisation.

Team based development models:

• A more pleasant working atmosphere, but leads to an uneven and difficult-to-assure testing process.

Interdepartmental model:

• Teams can sometimes end up passing costs to each other, but testing is easier to manage, and issues can be tracked.

Resource pool based model:

• This can have severe problems on working atmosphere, but is the most suitable for supporting an effective testing regime.

ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE

Organisations are not static but change over time

• Organisations often go through periods of restructuring

The goal is not to find the perfect organisational form, but to manage a changing organisation in a changing context. Restructuring is necessary because of factors including:

• Growth, Mergers, Changing purpose, Changing technology, Changing context.

Ciborra [4] argued there is a cycle in organistions between control and drift.

• Change occurs naturally, and is punctuated by efforts to regain control

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ORGANISATIONAL BOUNDARIES

Organisations have boundaries

• These are both internal and external and take different forms

• Physical boundaries• Unit boundaries• Organisation-wide boundaries

• The boundaries may be different on paper than in practice

• Communication across boundaries is often problematic

• formalised either through reports or formal meetings• “Boundary objects” need to be able to be transmit meaning

between different contexts.

ORGANISATIONAL BOUNDARIES

Boundaries can lead to “silo working”.

• People working in proximity to each other but within ‘closed’ arenas

According to Page [5], Silos occur because of:

• Turf wars

• Budget protection

• Bureaucratic politics

• Ignorance

• Legal reasons

• Technology reasons

OPERATIONAL PROCESSES

There are three types of business process: Managerial, operational, and support processes.

This area has generally been focused on efficiency rather than quality

• Adam Smith found it was possible to increase productivity in pin manufacturing by 2400% if production was organised into a process

• This was taken to extremes under Scientific management and Fordism where work was split into simple repetitive tasks

• More recently the emphasis has been on business process reengineering

OPERATIONAL PROCESSES

Proceduralisation and process reengineering is not necessarily contrary to dependability

• Many industries rely upon correct procedure being followed

• Regulation is also coming to rely heavily on the inspection of procedure

Problems emerge when

• There is an accompanying diminishing of responsibility

• Efficiency is taken to extreme

• Problems also emerge when processes are impractical or incomprehensible for people in the organisation

MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCEManagement

• Management involves planning, organising and controlling work in an organisation.

• Top level management: Develop goals, strategies, policies. • Middle management: Develop organisational functions.• Low level management: Assign and supervise tasks.

Governance

• Decisions that define expectations, grant power and responsibilities and verify performance

Complex organisations require effective governance. An overreliance on management is known as managerialism: where management seeks to control all aspects of organisational working.

MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE

Leadership

• A distinction can be made between management and leadership.

• Leaders show the way, but do not specify the means of travel.

• Remember - Good leaders need good followers. “Followership” is a skill too.

Responsibility

• Procedural responsibility

• Consequential responsibility

CULTURE

The idea of “Culture” is often invoked in characterising workplaces, particularly where it comes to non-functional aspects of this.

• “Organisational culture”

• “Safety culture“

• “Culture of trust”

This is a slippery term

• It is used to typify actions, rather than specify what does happen

• It is used at varying granularities

• It is used in several senses

CULTUREThe most comprehensive framework for describing culture comes from IBM. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory was developed in the 1970s. It was primarily aimed at working through cultural differences in a multinational firm.

It covers the degree of:

• Subordination to power

• Collectivism

• Uncertainty avoidance

• Masculinity (competitiveness, assertiveness, etc)*

• Temporal orientation (long vs short-term)

• Indulgence and restraint

There are many other models and frameworks for culture – but often these come from a managerial literature focused on instilling desirable values rather than describing or explaining culture.

*This was the 70s!

CULTURE

Anthropology is the academic field that studies culture.

• The management literature on culture, including Hofstede, is not taken seriously in this discipline!

In Anthropology, culture is largely a comparative concept.

• Over the last two decades, as anthropology has come to focus on organisations

• Culture rediscovered as “communities of practice”• Forms of understanding rediscovered as “distributed

cognition”• Emphasis placed on the contextualisation of practice.

Particularly its physical and social “situatedness”

PROFESSIONALISMAn alternative source of power in work and organisations arises through professional bodies

• Professional bodies develop around skilled areas of work, what Abbot [7] describes as Jurisdictions

• Not all areas are able to professionalise. Software development has had significant problems [7].

Professional bodies also seek to regulate the environments in which their members work, to ensure they can work effectively.

• To become a member of a profession usually requires some demonstration of skill

Trades Unions also seek to represent the interests of members

• Unions have been instrumental in the development of participatory design, and socio-technical approaches

“LOCATEDNESS”

LOCAL VARIABILITYThere can be variance across ostensibly equivalent parts of an organisation

• For example, there is large variation between NHS hospitals, and even between wards on the same hospital.

• Work is contingent upon local resources and constraints.• Practices are implemented, emerge and evolve locally.

Organisations will go through periods of standardisation, often through the deployment of technology

• But at local levels standards will always be interpreted, “gamed” or perhaps ignored.

• A classic study by Barley [8] found that the deployment of the same technology in different hospitals led not to further diversities in their practices.

SOCIAL NETWORKSAn alternative way of viewing organisations is in terms of the formal and informal social connections between people within organisations

• Social networks do not mirror organisational structure, although they will often have some correspondence to it

Strong networks improve

• Expertise finding (“know-who”)

• Social capital

• Awareness among workers

• Greater flows of information and innovation

• Loyalty

Email and electronic communication can be used to give an idea of social networks exist, but do not constitute social networks

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

Many organisations are turning to social technology

• Many large organisations are deploying their own internal social network sites

• Some are turning to ‘public’ social network sites (such as twitter), although many are restricting use of these - for security reasons

There is also a broader class of “collective intelligence” technologies – collaboration technologies that

• Enable sharing and structuring of information

• Enable adhoc communication

• Enable distribute problem solving

ORGANISATIONS

The problem of dependability does not usually sit in individual organisations

• Organisations often work with others

• Eg. suppliers, service providers, partners.• Technologies exist across organisations.

• The technology, or tasks such as maintenance may be offered as a service

• Different components may be operated by different organisations

• Organisations often operate in an “industry”

• Regulation will be at the industry level

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INTER ORGANISATIONAL RELATIONSHIPSWhen organisations collaborate or provide services there will usually be a formal agreement

• Eg. Contracts, SLAs

However, the ties between organisations need to be stronger than just having written agreements

• Eg. emergency workers do not just need to fulfill their specified roles but to work effectively together

• A well known example was Toyota’s ability to restart production just days after a supplier of a complex component suffered a catastrophic fire. [9]

Organisations are sometimes conceptualised in terms of ecosystems

• Formal and informal relations and dependencies exist between organisations

• Organistions can enter into strategic ecosystems, where they cooperate with others to supply services or build a market

Failures, accidents and disasters often have underlying organisational causes and factors…

KEY POINTS• Many accidents and disasters have organisaional roots

• These problems lie in the working of the organisation, so they cannot be resolved just by creating the correct ‘type’ of organisation but through ensuring organisations operate effectively

• The organisational model is usually an aspiration rather than a mirror, and even if the model is accurate, the organisation itself will change. This does not mean the model is unimportant!

• Organisational departments will not operate in uniform ways.

• Organisations often work closely with others. Cross boundary communication can often be more formalised.

• Network views of organisations point to the importance of connectedness over structure

REFERENCES1. Shrivastava, P. (1986), Bhopal,New York: Basic Books

2. Nagappan et al (2008) The Influence of Organisational Structure on Software Quality: An Empirical Case Study. In Proc. ICSE’08: 521-530.

3. Ahonen et al (2004) Impacts of the Organizational Model on Testing: Three Industrial Cases. Empirical Software Engineering, 9, 275–296, 2004.

4. Ciborra (2000) From control to drift : the dynamics of corporate information infrastructures. Oxford University Press.

5. Page, E. C. (2005). Joined-up government and the civil service. In V. Bogdanor (Ed.), Joined up government (pp. 139–155). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6. N. Pollock, and R. Williams. Software and Organizations. The Biography of the Enterprise-Wide System or How SAP Conquered the World. Routledge 2008

7. Abbott A (1988) The System of Professions. An Essay on the Division of Expert Labour. University of Chicago Press.

8. Barley, S. R. (1986). “Technology as an occasion for structuring: Evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments.” Administrative Science Quarterly 31(1): 78-108.9

9. Beaudet, and Nishiguchi,(1998) The Toyota Group and the Aisin Fire. Sloan Management Review, 40,1 1998