A different approach to improving cooperation

As humans have specialisized, we have been able to focus and because of this improve productivity. This has been possible because of COOPERATION.

Specialization started with agricultural revolution and evolved to manufacturing of different, crafts, goods and services.

In the modern age the trend has continued within organisations, as we split up in to smaller units to perform more specific tasks. You have probably seen the below image that is a symptom of what happens when specialisation goes too far WITHOUT COOPERATION

When COOPERATION fails no single individual can be blamed. Everyone probably did their best, but the sum of all part eventually was negative. This easily leads to a blame-game as everyone knows that they performed well so someone else must have messed up ??. Sales blames the engineers for stalling, project managers blame sales for promising unrealistic timetables and finance blames everyone else for not being cost cautious.

As digitalisation has come in to the picture each organisational silo has a wide variety of specialised tools available that are designed to manage a certain sub process or part of the companies main process. Sales has a CRM, project management has and ERP, designers has a PLM and finance is trying to interpret everything through data coming out of and accounting system. The list goes on. Modern management methods tend to allow teams to select their own tools, but this leaves no one to think about the big picture or to make sure that tools support the selected strategy.

At some point "the IT guy" is usually given the impossible task of making sure all the systems are integrated. The task is typically given without any background in to why certain things are done, because at this point nobody really knows how everything works. Many technical challenges arise, and most capable IT experts can solve these, but there are 5 practical and relevant questions that are usually forgotten:

• Is the right data moved between the systems?
• Which system is the "master" and which one is the "slave"
• How often does the data need to be moved?
• Is there a need to enhance or enrich the data before loading it in to the next system?
• Is the company making sacrifices in flexibility of the individual systems when introducing a new integration?

At Hailer we have built a process engine that can be modified to run any process on a low code basis. Changes can be made on the fly and as changes are made they are deployed globally in real time. In addition business logic can be written in to the process on a low code basis, but this is an optional extra that is not mandatory in the beginning. This means that any no technical person can understand how the system works and how it can be changed. The fundamental building blocks in Hailer are the same regardless of process, so this means that non technical person can also integrate different processes by ticking boxes and selecting what data to utilise across the organisation or network. This means that operational people can decide what data gets moved between parts of and organisation. The master/slave relationship is built in both operationally and technically as everyone can see who generates what data. Everything happens in real time as there is no integration between different systems with different architectures. Everyone can decide if they want to enrich or enhance the data that others generate. Some sacrifices are made in terms of flexibility, but as non technical people can see dependencies and therefore understand what data others use, changes can be applied also after the organisation becomes highly interdependent. As a result all people involved can use systems thinking to collaborate around how to improve the organisation and its processes. Constant development becomes business as usual.

But, processes, data and systems thinking is one aspect of how the organisation works, and not everyone has time or interest to spend time on developing these relatively slow moving aspects. Those that are least involved in this, are usually high performing forward looking people typically in management positions working on developing the business. These people are typically mainly working in a totally different layer of the systems. A layer where things happen fast.

For the fast moving, ever evolving things, organisations use different communication tools. In this day and age there are already too many of them and these communication tools form a collaborative layer on top of the data systems. Most people have between 3 and 10 different channels to bombard one another with messages, random files. Typically these tools are not linked to anything. Small teams suffer les from the consequences, but the more people are involved, the more complicated things become.

The chaotic and almost exponential increase in complexity what comes to messaging, combined with the fact that we are all online almost all the time, has lead to a focus crisis. We all write more messages everyday and this leads to an exponential increase in received massages. Ye Olde Email is still king, while messaging apps and social media channels are piling up on top.

At Hailer we want to solve this by making messaging an integral part of processes. With in-context communication the amount of messages can be brought down significantly as all data is available in the channel where messaging is done. The right people can gather around certain topics and invite one another when needed. In addition automatic updates and announcements can be sent between processes making sure everyone who needs to know is in the loop of what is going on.

Hailer allows for leaders and teams to build end to end processes with in context communication from a technical perspective, but we have learned from customer projects that the most important thing is that the organisations is willing to improve and evolve. COOPERATION is a team effort and no tool will solve the current state of things alone. At Hailer we are ready to help you if you wan to take a quantum leap in improving how your organisation works.