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February 24, 2005

About Alignment

Usually, our concerns about "good work" are well covered by just three big words in our vocabulary:
- quality,
- performance, and
- value.

Naturally, no one of these three things just arrives on its own. Additionally, it's hard to think of cases where having any two of them is likely without the third.

In the management effort, we constantly see and plan for the relationships that link these three to each other. But of the three things, the issue that is possibly most sensitive to management influence is "performance" -- that is, the execution to desired goals.

I.

Goals are usually thought of as end-points; to set that endpoint the goal provides definitions of certain conditions. We say that execution has had the required impact when execution conforms conditions to meet those definitions.

Among the conditions to be conformed, it's normal that some are already acting separately or interacting for some special purpose while others are at least indifferent to what we now want. For that reason, execution must act on the nature and relationships of those conditions -- and coordinate them so that they don't compete with the intended progress towards the goal. This coordination or alignment helps to overcome inertia, momentum in the wrong direction, and/or volativity.

In other words, alignment is a state that functions as a precondition for performance.

II.

Execution includes both the decisions and the hands-on actions that we call production. Production itself commonly selects inputs from external sources and channels, and "processes" them internally through a designated organization (such as a workgroup or project) under supervision.

This throughput is variable, and to keep it within acceptable tolerances the coordination of external and internal conditions must have high priority.

For example, external conditions include the quality and volume of inputs (supply); and internal conditions include the functionaility and immediacy of processing (readiness). Predictability and consistency is vital in both cases.

Therefore, alignment is needed both in external and internal environments.

Furthermore, because alignment may be practically discovered (self-emergent) or built (programmed), alignment actually comes from four directions:
- emergent external alignment;
- emergent internal;
- programmed external; and,
- programmed internal.

Managing alignment depends on awareness of the environment's dynamics. Each one of the four types of alignment must deal with a set of distinctive dynamics -- the flows and blends of states and events that characterize the conditions of the type of environment. Consequently, the information that each type presents to management can be quite dissimilar to the other three types. Yet each is a significant factor in the supply or readiness aspects of throughput.

Whether overall alignment proves manageable or not depends on leveraging distinctive competencies from within these four different situations in order to achieve and sustain the coordination necessary. A competency dynamically combines awareness with knowledge and skills under real-time demand.

III.

At any given time, all four types of alignment are factors with varying relative impact. Given this situation, the initial problem to address is to successfully sort out and describe the causes and effects characteristic of each area, that are most relevant to execution throughput.

In the representation of the distinctive alignment areas below , the picture shows four corresponding types of influence on execution, along with the two main reasons (accountability and compatibility) that management tracks them.

Following on that, developing a "common awareness" across the different areas of alignment is the key to their coordination.

IV.

Much of the work of defining the view on each alignment area is carried out by what is now called "business intelligence". Each area reports on matters that explain how its own activity and events are influencing things or are being influenced. Competencies found within the various types of alignment differ , and are and sometimes optimized in ways that increase their differences. From the perspective of execution throughput, the extent of those differences is often not as much in the foreground as it should be. But when recognized, this problem is addressed through integration initiatives.

Integration appears to circulate required information across boundaries, but the crucial work of developing the awareness common amongst the different areas falls to what is being called "knowledge management".

We're very accustomed to the idea of discovering connections through information processing, but to create the common awareness, knowledge processing must also be implemented. Knowledge processing discovers how different things are alike, not just how they affect each other.

V.

Information processing and knowledge processing contribute in different ways. The challenge is to make them co-operate in the four types of alignment.

Management's supervisory responsibility relies on sensitivity to pertinent descriptive facts -- or "intelligence". This naturally tends towards data collection (surveillance) about external factors and data validation (auditing) about internal factors.

But in those efforts:
- surveillance of emergent conditons rests on access, intervention and persistence. These are opportunities that may be highly dissimilar in external versus internal environments;
- meanwhile, the auditing of programmed conditions requires authority, methods and testing -- concerns which have resolutions that are typically unlike across external versus internal environments.

Although these differences are not insurmountable, such inherent limitations of business intelligence reflect the essential difficulty of comparing apples to oranges. Alternative knowledge processing is thus critically appropriate for relating the various areas of alignment. In a sense, solving integration issues with business intelligence is like making a fruit salad that is easier to consume, instead of finding the underlying principle that will make both apples and oranges grow better in the same climate. For the latter solution, knowledge management is better.

Along with the correlation of different competencies, an operational strategy for coordinating effects amongst the different areas must be selected. For any area, this will generally involve calibrating the area amongst the others, through one of four modes:
- waiting (to shrink scope and complexity)
- repositioning (to increase leverage)
- renovating ( to manage change in demand), or
- innovating (to create a new type of relationship).

While pursuing an operational strategy for each alignment area, the group of four strategies must also be co-ordinated with each other and over time.

Overall Alignment should therefore be modelled so that coordinated operational strategies (or "modes") for addressing the four flavors of alignment are visible for all operations to explicitly engage -- making alignment manageable. Effectively, that model of coordination is a portfolio.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at February 24, 2005 1:15 PM

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