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Working in the field of corporate responsibility and IT technology brings you in front of some odd situations and the occasional fascinating opportunity.
In my experience, the IT Geeks and corporate social responsibility (CSR) Gurus in this space seem to live, for the most part, in separate but parallel worlds. During my academic research and my practice over the last decade, I have uncovered some new ways where those worlds occasionally come together in exciting and productive ways.
Take for example stakeholder engagement — a concept at the very heart of the corporate responsibility movement. By paying attention to the impacts to and from stakeholders, a business can move beyond a flat shareholder view of the world and capture the benefits of being a truly sustainable business. In practice, it’s a daunting task and one that for most businesses remains very much a soft and fuzzy subject largely left to the CSR department.
The complexity of identifying stakeholder categories, assessing impacts, and discussing with stakeholders is increased by the fact that for every category a business will likely have thousands of individual stakeholders. It would be impossible to discuss with all of these individually, so business and institutional players fall back on the core concept of “representation” to dialogue with a few people who claim, and usually try very hard, to represent a given stakeholder class.
I interviewed more than 60 such representatives involved in the development of CSR and sustainability standards and initiatives around the world over the last five years and have worked with many more in the last decade. Both study and experience showed that, although these people are often doing the best they can to represent their stakeholder groups, their industries, or their countries, they often struggle with what stakeholder representation actually means or entails.
By looking at this process from a collaborative learning perspective, I uncovered at least three different ways that professionals view the art of representation.
There are the “experts” who see themselves as representative in the interpretative sense: They are typical of their stakeholder groups and expert in their domains. Representation for them is all about having the credibility and knowledge to be appointed an expert and entails a huge degree of freedom to represent without much immediate consultation.
A second group is the “professional representatives.” They take a very structural view of representation. Often members of organizations like trade associations or NGOs claim their seats at the table and set about communicating the agreed policies and positions of their respective host groups.
I call the third and diverse group “willing learners.” They have an intuitive sense that representation is a complex learning process that needs to be actively managed; however they nearly always struggle to understand how to be effective in that process.
The consequence of this confused situation is that some powerful representative voices travel loud and clear through these processes, but weaker, fainter voices are often left behind. Learning is lost or, to put it in a way familiar to IT ears, some of the requirements are lost.
When this happens, stakeholder engagement drives towards a seemingly inevitable consensus of the powerful where majority rules, and outlier views often containing more value and information (including weak signals that indicate low-frequency high risks or innovative opportunities) are averaged out — not really where the empowerment agenda of CSR wanted to end up.
This is where IT culture and practices have something to contribute. For years the size, scale, and complexity of IT projects has evolved into a rigorous and detailed approach to project management that could have wider implications in soft systems like stakeholder engagement. Requirements capture is part of the everyday toolset that links requirements in IT projects to their project stakeholders and allows participants to trace these requirements through the challenges and changes of complex IT project management.
Whether you are a fan of universal modeling language (UML) or other conventions of modeling requirements, there is no denying that by capturing requirements explicitly and tracing them from engagement through to process, product, or even organizational design, one can raise stakeholder engagement from a dark art to a well structured and detailed learning process. Requirements treated in this way at least have an audit trail. They can be prioritized, challenged, and even modified, but they can never be lost.
Of course, to realize the potential of these techniques in CSR, IT professionals need to move a step towards the world of issues and “content,” and CSR professionals need to be open to trying techniques that were “not invented here” in their own context. In the last few years I have seen many individuals personally embody this learning process through their own professional journeys: IT project managers becoming CSR experts; supply chain managers deploying IT systems to engage their suppliers; and CSR professionals getting deep into IT systems and culture.
Sustainable IT is a great melting pot of skills and experience, and some incredible talent is emerging from that learning process. I’m looking forward to seeing where these future leaders go and what they contribute to some of the thorny problems of CSR and sustainability that we face together.
This blog reflects some of the ideas and findings of the DBA thesis, “Collaborative Learning and the Co-Design of Corporate Responsibility,” available through Bradford School of Management in the United Kingdom, and is the subject of a draft academic paper on this theme.
You seem to describe a CSR world where he who shouts loudest gets their way. A bit like the UN.
I think there's something else that IT can bring to this world; and that's the equalizing effect of wiki and social networking technology and its ability to provide a level playing field for anyone with a keyboard to make themselves “heard.”
Steve
Paul, As much as I would like to agree with you that IT can help in this process, I am concerned the impact may be minimal especially if the dominant voice is raised high enough that others are drowned out. The reason some people raise their voices loudly enough in any environment, including in social responsibility situations, is that they've learned it works and gets them attention. Can IT really help to equalize the situation or at the very least elevate other voices and furthermore, can it help quieten the loud voices enough to enable others help move the corporate agenda forward?
Truly the opportunities and possibilities that IT provides to this challenge are enormous but like Bolaji and Steve have mentioned, i don't believe it can provide equality of voice and opinion.
This is because it is not the only media.
However, the effect of online opinion poll, online campaigns using social networking sites and the attention the online community is being given as relating to significant issues seams to tell me that with a little more strategic effort, I.T. could make a significant difference.
Equality of voice and opinion. ….nice Tioluwa! I think that is the best words for the role of IT in our society. Today if you want to be heard all you need is a internet connection and a PC. CSR approach is more community based – outreach program, tree planting, world peace thingy which is for me is a bit overrated. I hope companies will take advantage on IT with their CSR programs.
I think that as long as Seagate keeps its OEM and partner realtionships intact, they should be a good player in the storage market for some time. For the most part, they have done a great job at improving the reliability and performance of their disks in the last decade.
I'm not too sure about the effect of going private but as long as their business practices stay on the lean side and their industry brand does not suffer any major setbacks, the company should be ok (in my eyes…).
“…I.T. could make a significant difference.”
To touch on your point, IT is not the difference-maker, the application of the technology is what counts. It is the responsibility of those designing and implementing those applications that are significant here.
I don't know how well Bolaji dug into Seagate's past or the activities of the private equity group that in the past took the company private and want to do an encore but these guys don't horse around with their money. They will do their homework. You can count on that. If they are already talking with Seagate, you can bet they've done some homework and that the numbers are looking good from their perspective.
Anna,
Good point. But there have been companies in the past that make acquisition blunders. I wouldn't count on that as an indicator that a company is viable. Rather, look at how they've been operating for the past 3-4 fiscal years. As far as my indicators tell me (especially with the economic times taken into consideration) that they're doing well realtively speaking.
If IT professionals can design sustainable common sense into the model, I'm all for it! Seems like the applications would be endless.
pocharle, It seems Seagate isn't doing as well as might be expected of a company that's a leader in the industry. It reported results today and its performance did not match analysts' expectations. The company is dealing with excess supplies of drives in its market and rival Western Digital is breathing heavily down on it. I would say Seagate could be in trouble. Time for a closer look at its financial performance. Perhaps the folks who want to take it private believe the management is the problem. Maybe Bolaji can offer us some insight into Seagate. I also wonder if Seagate is a ticking timebomb.
EBN columnist and long-term editor in the electronics industry Tam Harbert mentioned to me recently that the leveraged buyout group that took Seagate private at the beginning of the decade actually got hefty returns on their investment when the company had its initial public offering in December 2002. Although figures are hard to come by, Tam pointed to a story she wrote in March 2003 where she explored the profits made by the group that took the company private.
If the LBO group made out like bandits 8 years ago, it is understandable why they may be swarming around Seagate again. It tells a lot about the company's management too. What exactly are they doing wrong and how did this market leader close its last quarter with almost net zero in cash? I hope to look further into Seagate in a future article.
I think Seagate makeover strategy is good. In the OEM industry you need to be more flexible to the needs of your clients. But for Seagate to stay in the game they need to revamp their OEM Alliance strategy and expand their market other than their current OEM partners.
maou_villaflores,
Thanks for the comment. I think that as long as Seagate can keep Apple as a customer, they will be okay. With the slate of notebooks that they have been putting out on the market and the love of Mac products, they have a great partner in Apple.
I think they also have a long-term deal with Dell. If they could pickup a few more partners like that, they would be stable to say the least.
This is not a problem that is unique to Seagate, but rather a problem for HDD manufacturers as a whole. Western Digital is also seeing a weakening of demand and according to their CEO, could see a 10-20% drop in HDD demand over the next four quarters or more. This is due to the increased demand in SSD due to the popularity of iPads and tablets. With the launch of Apple’s MacBook Air, could this be another trend for diskless devices? Apple may be a good partner now for Seagate, but how does that look for the long run?
Great analysis, Bola. And Tam is right, last time investors made a pile–I am told–on the private-to-public-again maneuvers.
I'd love to see an analysis (or hear comments about) of WHY investors did well then and WHAT if any changes the private-to-public-again shift had on Seagate's OEM customers.
Drive on!
Rick, Thanks for the observation backing up Tam Harbert's comments. In addition to the questions you raised, I would like to know what exactly the private equity group would do different with Seagate now that they didn't do years ago. Would they reshape the company management, refine product lines and reorganize operations? If the company is being considered for private ownership only years after it went public, why is this beginning to look like a recurring nightmare? And, do you think they will get it right this time?
Hi Rick, Good to read your posting. As a veteran of this market you know the issues quite well and Seagate's current market position as well as the interest shown in the company by the private equity group of investors is interesting. Tam Harbert correctly pointed out that the previous equity group made a bundle on their Seagate investment 10 years ago. I am just puzzled as to why this is happening again. It's like Groundhog Day. If they take the company private again what exact changes will be made and what would be the long-term implications of this move on Seagate and also on the HDD market?
Software project management relies heavily on input from stakeholders. The quality of software varies with the degree to which so-called domain experts have contributed to the understanding of how the software is supposed to work. This concept was put forward by leaders in the move to object-oriented programming (also UML proponents, see Booch and Maksimchuk).
It's a reality of larger enterprises that domain experts are not the people who go out and procure software. The initial statements of work that kick off the design and implementation of enterprise software have proven to be far from the specs of the end product. Actual specifications have to be finessed out of people who generally enter the procurement process with some reluctance.
This is just a way that what are known as human factors enter into business. In real life, information of value is not obtained by listening to the loudest voice. Often it's a process of deriving one thing from another–using actual logic!