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ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS VI
well to that end. There are two reasons:
differentiation of the contexts in which the cultures
evolved (different climates, different geography),
and the ongoing march of change. Human beings
learn, and cultures and societies as a whole learn and
change. Good software supports change. Good
organizations support change.
Change is hard. Software change has little to do
with softness; it is hard. Cultural change is even
harder. One major goal of a culture is to maintain
status quo: to keep familiar things familiar. Left to
its own devices, a culture changes little or not at all.
Given external stimuli that tend to undermine its
rituals or assumptions, it changes slowly by default.
A responsively changing organization requires
active learning at the organizational level: the
external stimulus must become an internal stimulus
and focus. How does this learning take place?
Most modern software folks, and certainly those
who have learned enough to know that organizations
and people are important, will tell you that it is an
issue of development process. If one can change the
process, then one can accommodate most changes
suffered by a culture such as a software development
organization. This assessment is correct up to a
point. The next and more interesting questions are:
Where do processes come from, and how does
process learning take place?
Swieringa and Wierdsma (1992) talk about three
structures in an organization and about the different
levels of learning that happen for these three
structures. At the most surface level are
organizational processes; they speak of single-loop
learning that happens at this level, a learning of
relationships between cause and effect. Beneath that
level is the structure of the organization: the
relationships, entities, and patterns that make the
organization what it is. One might ask, for example,
what caused the organization even to want to learn.
The processes themselves don’t beg for learning;
there is something in the structure of the organization
itself (or deeper) that encourages this
learning. So, for example, learning how to learn
might be an issue of organizational structure. That is
a doubly recursive feedback loop with respect to the
cause-and-effect model of the process level.
Learning at this level is called double-loop learning.
A third level of organizational learning answers the
question of where structure comes from: it comes
from principles and values. These properties go to
the heart of the organization’s identity. Learning at
that level is triple-loop learning: re-inventing the
organization.
For example, why do you have a code review
process? We have code reviews because of
functional differentiation within the organization.
Coders do code, but we need someone to review
their code from the perspective of a different “place”
in the organizational structure. This “place” may be
the structure of another piece of code (code written
by someone else), or the perspective of the tester, or
the perspective of the people who understand the
requirements and who want to know whether the
code will do what it is supposed to do. This
differentiation in structure is itself what gives rise to
processes such as code reviews, integration builds,
and test plans. Where does this structure come from?
It comes from principles and values: principles such
as divide and conquer (division of labour), and
values such as quality (which creates those parts of
structure that attend to testing and perhaps to process
itself).
Re-inventing the business is hard, and some
businesses haven’t survived attempts to do
themselves this favour. Yet single-loop learning can
only be temporary because the deeper structural
level will cause processes to revert to their former
successions. Change must happen at the structural
level. To make lasting changes to organizational
processes means changing the organizational
structure.
Changing the organizational structure means
more than shuffling titles on an organizational chart.
In the cultural sense, “organizational structure”
means the patterns of relationships between roles,
individuals, and groups within the enterprise. Having
a piece of paper called an organizational chart that
states what the organization is doesn’t make it so;
the structure of the real organization can be found
around the water coolers, in Email exchanges, in the
hallways where groups of people are collocated and,
to some smaller degree, in the meetings that bring
people together. There is a structure in these
relationships. Swieringa and Wierdsma call this the
instrumental structure of the organization.
Real change in an organization comes from
evolution of the instrumental structure. Change is the
only certainty in life. What are the units of change?
Patterns fit the need very well for several reasons.
First, patterns are enduring. Because they work
at the structural level, they aren’t temporary in the
sense that process changes are temporary.
Second, they are incremental. A good pattern is a
structure-preserving transformation. It works locally,
adding structure to some part of a system while
sustaining the remaining overall structure. Big
changes are hard; they best can be accomplished by
series of small changes. Is this always possible? No.
However, many organizational changes can and
should be accomplished piecemeal while they are
too often orchestrated through a Big Bang. Some
organizations are never the same thereafter.