Welcome to the Matrix Ed!
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From: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "futurework" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Futurework] And even more productivity or what?
Date: Thu, Dec 4, 2003, 2:20 PM
I was educated in the 1950s and 1960s. Until I retired from the Canadian public service some sixteen years ago, I had always worked in hierarchical, stratified institutions. In government, my Minister sat at the top, my Deputy Minister just a little below him, my Assistant Deputy below him, me a little further down and all kinds of other people in layers below. In the oil patch in Calgary, my one encounter with the corporate private sector, it was much the same – a Chairman of the Board at the top, a CEO a little further down, (though he didn’t think so), then vice presidents, and down, down, down through layers and layers where the actual work got done, including drilling for oil and gas. Moreover, in both government and industry, the people who ran the show were mostly in one place, in tall buildings like the ones you see in Calgary or Ottawa.
That’s still how I still picture corporate work and organization to be, but recently I’ve run into something quite different. In trying to establish a website for a group of churches that run a foodbank, I’ve had to deal with the employees of an Internet service provider to resolve a problem that I, as a non-technical person, found very difficult. There were two aspects to the problem, one technical and the other financial. To resolve both, I had to interact with persons known as "Customer Care Agents" (CCAs). While these people were helpful or rude on the technical side, depending on who I happened to hit in a particular phone call, they were not at all helpful on the financial side. They simply didn’t know anything about it. So, I asked them, kindly at first though more heatedly as the conversation developed, to put me through to "Accounts". Well, Sir, they couldn’t do that because there really wasn’t anybody like that, but they would try to get the information for me. From whom? Well, they weren’t really sure, but they would get it somewhere.
At one point in my dealings with the CCAs, I flew into a towering rage. I bellowed and threatened to sue, and asked who the CEO was so that I could write him a letter on how terribly I had been dealt with. Well, Sir, we really don’t know, was the response. Well then, where are your headquarters, I asked. We think they’re in Alberta, Sir, but we really aren’t sure. Well, you have an office here in Ottawa. Who can I see there!!!??? There’s no one there, Sir, we’re all over the place. I gave up, slammed the phone down and stormed around the block several times.
Gradually, in several bouts of raising my blood pressure to the limit and beyond, I came to realize that I was not dealing with something that fitted my concept of a corporate entity. There were no layers of people in one place. There was no hierarchy. There were people in various parts of Ottawa connected by telephone and computer grids of some kind. They had technical knowledge but little idea of what they were part of, a much larger grid extending across Canada that included contracting out many of the things that corporate entities are, by my image, supposed to do internally. Though there must be a center, though there must be a CEO, though there must be a Board of Directors, the CCAs I was dealing with had no idea of where these things were.
And maybe there were no such things. What if the corporation, if that is what it was, just grew organically and horizontally, with somebody contracted out to do its accounting, someone else contracted out to ensure a supply of hardware, software and technology, someone else contracted out moving the whole thing into new urban centres, and yet another contractor building a corporate myth to ensure that the CCAs said the right thing in dealing with guys like me, and not too blatantly conveying the reality of fronting for computers, computers, computers all the way down?
Ed
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