Invitations and Becomings

Intranet CMSs naturally promote what I call 'management creep'. This is not meant to be a comment on the character of managers. Instead, I mean the tendency to convert high bandwidth communications into low bandwidth communications in the name of making things easier to manage.

Let me explain. Email is a high bandwidth form of communication. A single email 'transaction' whose purpose may be to request the performance of some business, can also include all the essential information required to complete that task. If it doesn't, that information can be efficiently requested and delivered. Email is high bandwidth in the sense that it enables the rapid exchange of highly customised information.

What's more, extraneous information - like what everyone's doing on the weekend - that only serves to enhance the relationship between the people involved is often included. Email's strength here is that it isn't purpose-built, and so can contribute to maintaining what Yokhai Benkler, for one, calls "strong ties".

By contrast, a semi-automated workflow process built into an intranet CMS allows only low-bandwidth communication. Each participant interracts in a constrained way with the CMS and the CMS coordinates all communication according solely to the demands of the workflow it is executing. Because the parties communicate indirectly through the CMS, communication is restricted relative to both senses mentioned above. Incomplete or incorrect information is only repaired slowly, and no extraneous, relationship-building information is included.

The value of indirect, low-bandwidth communication like this is that it is easy to track and quantify, so it's naturally attractive from a management perspective. The cost is that low bandwidth connections can only sustain weak ties - connections between people that are purely formal and functional.

What I mean by management creep, then, is a situation in which strong ties are progressively converted into weak ties by management's desire to formalise processes. The process that gets formalised by using a CMS is content creation, and the ties that are weakened are between those who request content, who writes it, who edits it and who approves it.

What happens during the life of a CMS is that people develop sophisticated ways of working around these formalised processes, perhaps because workloads and perhaps also because the negotiation of different personal styles demands it. As a result, the formalised process becomes empty of business significance and with it the CMS.

My suspicion is that the normal response is to think that the workflow built into the system is out of date. If we could just build a new workflow that accurately reflected the way we actually do things now, everything would be better. What this neglects is the extent to which business processes are being prompted to change by the implementation of ANY system, because of management creep - i.e. the way we do things now is not just *different* to the processes at the time the system was designed, they are the result of using that system.

The first task would be to illustrate the variety of ways in which workarounds become institutionalised through replacing the CMS.

Then the challenge would be to come up with some patterns for identifying strong and weak ties, and management creep, and also some patterns for minimising the impact of your CMS on important working relationships.