Understanding Business Process Change Failure: An Actor-Network Perspective (Summer 2006)

1. Understanding Business Process Change Failure: An Actor-Network Perspective (Summer 2006) Authors: Suprateek Sarker Saonee Sarker Anna Sidorova Presented By: Roshni Patel

2. Key Terms Business Process Change (BPC) • It was introduced at early 1990s, and it continues to enjoy significant popularity and relevance. • But unfortunately the promises of BPC were not always being realized, and about 70 percent of BPC initiatives are believed to have failed.

3. Actor Network Theory (ANT) • In the earliest work on ANT it was outlined how micro actors (i.e. individuals) form alliances and enroll other actors, thus creating the heterogeneous networks made of humans and nonhuman artifacts. • These networks were found to act as if they were independent autonomous actors, hence they are referred to as “Actor-Networks”.

4. Actor • It may be human or nonhuman. • It may be defined as “any element which bends space around itself, makes other elements dependent upon itself and translates their will into the language of its own” • Some examples of actor includes humans, collectivities of human, ideologies, concepts, texts, computers and other technical artifacts. • Treating a heterogeneous network as an individual actor to reduce network complexity is called Punctualization.

5. ANT employs a radically relational approach, implying that each actor can be defined and understood only in relation to other actors. • Nondiscrimination between human and nonhuman actors is one of the distinguishing and most controversial characteristics of ANT. • ANT is a sociotechnical perspective for analyzing the interactions between technology and human processes.

6. ANT can serve as useful theoretical lens for understanding sociopolitical phenomena such as BPC. • ANT provides added explanatory power over existing theories in two primary ways. • First, It does not exclude the nonhuman actors from the analysis • Second, it does not distinguish between micro(e.g. Individuals) and macros actors (e.g. Organizations), and it acknowledges the inherently unstable nature of actors.

7. Translation • In ANT vocabulary, translation refers to the process of creating a temporary social order, or movement from one order to another, through changes in the alignment of interests in a network. • The process of translation can be divided into three stages that are labeled as • Problematization • Interessement • Enrollment

8. Case Study • Here the authors used case study methodology to guide collection and analysis of data. They used the concepts of ANT for developing the theoretical sensitivity that allows to view large number of data in a certain manner and to make sense of them. • Here the data was collected through multiple semistructured interviews with different members in organization at different levels and departments.

9. The formal face to face interviews are conducted in some depth, which lasted for one or two hours. • They attempted to capture facts and emotional responses of interviewee to different aspects of BPC. • The other Informal interviews, including one conducted over the telephone, were for clarification purposes. • In this ways the entire set of data was collected in the later half of 1996.

10. Interpretive Research • This research can be conducted within variety of traditions, for e.g. it is widely recognized that there are many types of ethnography, including the realist and impressionist genres. • Similarly the hermeneutic interpretation may be conducted within a validation or a philosophical tradition. • Even most recently developed grounded theory methods had experienced tensions.

11. Interpretive case studies draw all of the three above mentioned methodologies. • Thus Interpretive case researchers experience complexities of mixing elements from different methodologies and also inherit dilemmas within each methodology. • But the genre in this paper is partly shaped by authors position regarding “reality” and partly by their conception of “interpretation”.

12. Hirsch’s Statement “ Every interpretation begins and ends in a guess, and no one has ever described a method of making intelligent guesses” This statement high lightens the “productive”, “imaginative” and nonprocedural nature of interpretation.

13. ANT served as “device of mind” that enabled the authors to interpret and elaborate on texts from TELECO, highlighting aspects of BPC phenomenon which may not have been adequately captures through inductive methods. • The interpretive guesses are not presented as the final understanding without “validation”- that is the apparent anomalies and inconsistencies in the texts were removed.

14. Brief Description of TELECO Situation • TELECO is a telecommunication company in the united states having approximately 3,500 employees in the year of 1993. • In response to the growing concerns regarding inevitable changes in the organization’s external environment, the president, along with the vice presidents initiated the BPC project. • The first step was to hire reputed consulting firm and then assemble BPC team.

15. The team was given the task of redesigning “every process in the entire company” within one year. • The objective of this BPC initiative was to enhance service, speed, quality and value for customers. • The BPC team studied the organization for several months and came up with the elaborate redesign. The redesign uses the IT tools like Visio and Microsoft Project.

16. Reasons for Initiative being a failure • Using term low-hanging fruit for obvious candidates for layoff. • Many proposed process changes and all changed requiring new IT. • Team members were not ready to prioritize the proposals. • Because of attractive retirement package the whole staff and top management changed and so abruptly abandoned the BPC plans, resulting in the initiative being a failure.

17. Timeline of the Initiative • -First half of the year, redesign completed. • Retirement offers made • Middle of the year people selected into redesigned process BPC team formed, redesign starts -Ongoing implementation amid confusion -Change in president, and abandonment of the initiative Self study team formed to analyze the environment Data collection May-December 1996 1993 1994 1995 1996

18. An Interpretation of TELECO’s BPC initiative Using ANT • Here we use the ANT concepts described earlier and interpret the sequence of events before, during and after the BPC initiative at TELECO as a process of creation, gradual expansion and collapse of actor networks. • Here the focus is on the actor networks primarily within the organization.

19. The “Old” (Pre-BPC) TELECO Network • For many years, the quality of the business processes historically established at TELECO had been adequate to guarantee the company’s existence and its economic success. • From ANT perspective, TELECO could be viewed as actor-network consisting of top management, employees, the union and technology, each having a taken-for-granted role in the company.

20. IT Legacy Systems Punctualized actor(TELECO) Punctualized actor Top Management Union Employees An ANT View of Pre-BPC TELECO Network

21. Creating a New Network- Problematization • In face of the imminent changes in the business environment, the top management of TELECO sensed a threat to the organization’s interests and realized that they would have to change the old network. • After a thorough analysis of the situation the team came up with a report that states “ The whole telecommunications world is changing rapidly, What we need to do is reengineer the entire company.”

22. Identification of Relevant Actors • The top management was identified as initiating focal actor. • Few handpicked and highly knowledgeable employees (internal experts) were invited to join BPC team. • In addition to that, the BPC team included employees of the leading consulting organization that are hired to facilitate the entire BPC initiative. • Also Unions were enrolled to support post-BPC network, either as actors in post BPC or actors who pose no resistance to its formation.

23. Attempts were made to enroll IT vendors through requests for proposals (RFPs) and awarding contracts. • But the top management and BPC team viewed IT not as an actor in its own right with potential to pose resistance because of its interests, but as a passive element that, when plugged in would automatically enable new functionality in business processes. • The next step in Problematization stage is to define OPP (obligatory passage point)- a situation or process that is specified by focal actor such that all relevant actors can achieve shared focus in successfully pursuing the interests attributed to them.

24. Definition of OPP in the Problematization stage • Employees have to pass through OPP, if they want long term financial well being, viewed as key actors, receive recognition etc. • Internal experts have to put extra hours to learn methodologies, business processes and tools. • Consultants have to modify their assumptions about BPC. • IT vendors have to invest in mastering new technologies and in adapting existing technologies.

25. Creating the New Network – Interessement • The second step in translation involves convincing the actors to agree on the interests defined for them by TELECO’s top management. • Implicit Negotiations with and the enrollment of the BPC concept. • Negotiations with and enrollment of Members of the BPC team. • Negotiations with and the enrollment of the IT vendor.

26. Contd.. • Negotiations with and the enrollment of the Employees and Union. • Unplanned and Awkward Negotiations with the BPC tools • Unplanned and Awkward Negotiations with Business process- Enabling IT • Unplanned and Awkward Negotiations with Individual Senior Executives

27. Creating a New Network- Enrollment • Did the top management, the focal actor that started translating the interests of other relevant actors, achieve enrollment of the actors in the post-BPC network? • Even though the translation process had started well and actors are successfully enrolled as BPC team members initially, the overall enrollment process assesses when the initiative was discontinued, can be judged as a “failure”.

28. In later stages BPC members experienced immense stress. • BPC team members felt threatened to design- out their own positions. • Individuals were expected to work simultaneously in both pre and post BPC, without any resources for transition positions. • Hence even with enormous resources spent TELECO operations almost collapsed owing to lack of alignment among network elements • Here the figure ‘A’ shows the Intended post-BPC actor-Network and figure ‘B’ shows the actual post-BPC actor-network.

29. Punctualized actor BPC Tools BPC concepts/ Techniques Employees BPC Team Punctualized actor Top Mgmt Plans Punctualized focal actor Union IT Vendors A Punctualized actor

30. Disintegration of Punctualized actor BPC Tools BPC concepts/ Techniques Employees BPC Team Disintegration of Punctualized actor Top Mgmt Plans Disintegration of Punctualized focal actor Union Sr. Exec Sr. Exec IT Vendors B Disintegration of Punctualized actor

31. Hence the goal of improvement of TELECO’s effectiveness was not achieved. • All the actors experienced the initiative as a painful and pointless exercise. • Also the president, key ally of post-BPC betrayed it by retiring during this time. • The changing external conditions signaling that potential competitors would not enter TELECO’s market, led the new president to betray the interest in post BPC network.

32. Issues that prevented successful enrollment of post BPC. There are mainly four issues that are partially overlapping: • Errors and Omissions during Problematization • Limitations of Interessement strategies • Complexities of Enrollment • Problems related to post enrollment.

33. Errors during Problematization stage • Due to Punctualization, senior executives were not identified as actors. • Focus was primarily on the human actors’ • Nonhuman actors such as IT, which had significant roles within the BPC initiative, were not identified. • Problematization is not a one time activity, its an ongoing process. Thus, as previously unanticipated actors come into view, they need to be identified and enrolled.

34. Limitations of Interessement Strategies • No effort was made by top management to stop the use of alienating type of BPC-related vocabulary such as “low-hanging fruit” and “hatchet-in-the-head”. • Alienation of the reengineering team from the rest of the employees created a sense of secrecy, leading to suspicion in mind of other employees and hence, a lack of commitment to the initiative on their behalf.

35. Complexities of Enrollment • Failure to manage parallel translation processes at different levels of the social network. • Early in the project, top management was able to form aligned network. However later on, the senior executives found that their own individual interests were being compromised due to the BPC initiative, and they started to oppose any design that was not compatible with their own interests.

36. Post enrollment pitfalls : Betrayal • A number of actors betrayed their representatives like: • IT betrayed its representatives by failing to perform according to the specifications. • Employees betrayed their representatives (union) by opportunistically taking advantage of retirement packages. • Top management also betrayed the BPC initiative by abandoning the BPC initiative suddenly.

37. Post Enrollment pitfalls: Irreversible Inscription of Interests • The initial layoff schedule for employees was drawn up with the assumption that the technology replacing them would be implemented by that time. However, even though the technology was far from implementation when the layoff dates arrived, the HR department acted as per the original schedule inscribed in the redesign document. This led to a collapse of company operations.

38. Post Enrollment pitfalls: difficulties encountered in remaining aligned with weak competing networks • During the initiative, top management attempted to move actors from their old networks to the new “post-BPC network.” • This move created a gridlock in the organization, because no individual could move to the new network until he or she had been replaced by another in the old network, and vice versa.

39. Conclusion • Thus ANT seeks to open up a knowledge arena by revisiting taken for granted ideas about humans and nonhumans in organizations and the changing nature of linkages among them.

40. Questions??