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Building and Leveraging Trust to pursue Organizational Mandates by Architecting Enterprise Systems for

Evidence based Operations & Transacting Knowledge

Dr K. Jayakumar Joint Secretary Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India

 

In the course of pursuing outcome driven performances, building organizational capacity, or for pursuing a transition to knowledge based organization culture, it is necessary to build trust and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders to facilitate accomplishment of goals and prescribed organizational mandates. It would be necessary to institutionalize progressive practices to build trust at all levels and sustain a professional performance culture, through an enterprise support system that promotes communications, interactions and collaboration on the basis of evidence based professional methods. Enterprise systems require to be designed with transparent methods for dissemination of information, allocation of work, measurement of performance and facilitate incentives for efforts and contributions to ensure enhanced levels of trust that would energize and promote organizational productivity.  

1. Context

In the course of an enterprise carrying out its mandate, its functions and operations are entrusted with various performing teams within the enterprise. Each of these teams may adopt and embrace a variety of approaches, ranging from an operational arrangement which involves formal, well structured framework of delegation, accountability and workflow, to a less structured informal self organization and framework, with teams having capabilities for autonomous goal setting, flexible allocation of responsibilities and dynamic monitoring of performance outcomes.

The trust that exists within the members of various teams, between the team members and their team leaders or in the case of a more formal structure, between the supervising officers and the employees reporting to them,- determines the efficacy with which tasks get performed. When trust is high, the efforts that each member has to make or for that matter the efforts that the supervising officers have to make to engage, interact and pursue actions to get work done, in pursuit of envisaged outcomes, is much less. Commensurate with the efforts, are the aspects concerning administrative costs, on account of time taken to interact, convince, engage, monitor, mentor and guide various

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efforts. Trust deficits have a detrimental impact in terms of increasing costs for the enterprise in the process of pursuing and accomplishing results.

2. The Need for Building Trust in Organizations

It has been observed that the emerging organizational culture in enterprises has a multi-cultural character, with employees perceiving incidents, events, contexts and action differently from their own individualized frames of reference. Also with the induction of younger employees belonging to the current generation, entrenched practices, philosophies and perceptions that prevail in the enterprise, gets questioned and challenged. It has become necessary for the Senior Managers and Officers to present themselves in ways that makes their juniors perceive their actions as credible.

Further, with enterprises placing more significance on the capability of their employees to accomplish desired outcomes, performance assessments go beyond knowledge, skill sets and competencies. It is not uncommon for younger talent to get promoted to shoulder higher responsibilities, with more elderly employees reporting to them. Under these circumstances, the aspect of trust to be built within the enterprise at all levels, within and across teams, become much more necessary to ensure cooperation and collaborative team work. In the absence of such trust, even bonafide actions could be misconstrued as unfair practice, favoritism or colorable exercise of authority. 3. How Trust can be augmented with Systems Engineering The trust between employees within teams and across teams get enhanced when more rigorous efforts are made to (i) create a better understanding of the context, (ii) nurture an open and inclusive environment for exchange of perceptions, (iii) enhance the quality of communication, (iv) delegate authority to others with effective mentoring and handholding and (v) by making conscious efforts to nurture leadership at all levels.

Building Trust poses a pivotal challenge in organizations and concerns the manner in which enterprises design, develop and architect systems to (i) engage the knowledge workers and stakeholders (ii) reinforce their trust in systems, policies, practices that are followed (iii) cherish organizational values and the culture that has been nourished by orchestrated initiatives and (iv) sustain performance on the basis of an evidence based transparent approach and systems engineered for innovations and breakthroughs. Systems can be engineered to augment trust by encouraging professional behavior for information sharing, collaborative team work, enhancing interaction and feedback, updating of knowledge, and collective problem solving. Enterprise systems can be

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designed to emulate the Open systems model of social networking to improve communication across teams. Enterprise systems would need to (i) facilitate the development of policies and practices proactively on the basis of evidence that get generated as the enterprise performs its various operations and (ii) encompass mechanisms designed to initiate warning or active interventions based on event triggers, intelligent tracking and monitoring of process transactions. From the perspective of enhancing trust it may also be necessary to focus on organizational learning, augmenting enterprise capacity for professional decision making and effective problem solving. Enterprise systems would need to support and build up trust as an essential ingredient of the practices that it promotes and sustains within the organization. It could be seen that a repertoire of cognitive rules and operations get invoked by individuals and teams, in a given problem solving context or during the performance of tasks associated with the prescribed roles that are performed in pursuit of enterprise goals. Trust can be augmented by supporting objectivity in cognitive operations particularly in aspects such as comprehending facts, perceiving relationships, referencing, analyzing or judging similarities and differences, presenting data in objective form with appropriate contextual information, reasoned basis of classification or categorization, prioritizing or sequencing operations to discern patterns on the basis of objective criterion/ grounds, making associations, facilitating detection and alerting for occurrence of deviations and so on. A common denominator which facilitates professional behavior, enhance learning and productivity in organizations is trust in the enterprise policies, practices and systems as also its associated impact on interpersonal behavior, team work and collaboration. An environment of trust triggers and facilitates healthy thoughts, actions, learning and pleasant experiences necessary for implementing objective methods of decision making and problem solving.

The ability of organization to respond effectively and adapt its capabilities for evolving solutions to complex problems, relies increasingly on, sharing information across the enterprise and transparency of transactions, to enable all concerned to reflect and provide inputs that add value to such transactions. 

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2. Building Trust through ingenious design of Systems for Autonomous Capabilities

The second primary concern is the ability to nurture and enhance trust through ingenious design and intelligent architecture of systems, by either (i) providing autonomous capabilities for self-correction and self-organization, on the basis of required alerts and triggers or (ii) by implementing active warning systems to support enterprise users to execute corrective intervention action sequences when dysfunctionalities and deficiencies are observed. Trust results as a consequence of reinforcing experiences associated with objective methods and professional approaches to decision making. Such approaches rely on policies, practices developed and tweaked over time, on the basis of objective methods, rationale and supporting analytics/evidences that efficiently and effectively marshal relevant facts to help in ;

(i) making it evident that decision making has been based on objective transparent methods

(ii) disseminating the basis and underlying knowledge that helps avoid common errors/ misgivings,

(iii) pruning unproductive paths of reasoning, (iv) ordering search for facts that fill the knowledge gaps, (v) eliminating redundancy or extraneous aspects that obstructs clarity on issues,

(vi) reducing ambiguities, (vii) leveraging and exploiting knowledge from complementary domain areas and

(viii) examining options to resolve problems from multiple perspectives or levels of abstraction or granularity

Experiential knowledge is a product of context, as also the creator of context. Knowledge structures would need to be seen as distinct from the processes that operate upon them. The repertoire of cognitive rules and operations invoked during knowledge related transactions, get modified dynamically with learning and experience. Again intelligent behavior in a given context, leverages on learning and experience, with associations being made to activate the required cognitive rules and operations. Thus cognitive rules per se are necessary, but not a sufficient condition for intelligent behavior. Experiential knowledge can be embedded in the design of mechanisms and enterprise applications to reinforce intelligent behaviors and consequentially enhance trust.

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  3. Designing Transaction Mechanisms in Enterprise/ ERP Solutions A transaction may involve a set of tasks comprising preparation of a brief on the context, analysis of the problem, presenting options for decision making, reasoning the appropriate choices, justifying the course of action and seeking endorsements on significant propositions which will enable proceed with a given course of action understanding its consequences. Complex problem situations may require conceptualizing a model or a solution framework to explain the characteristics of the presented situations or scenario. Different cases may require varying depths of analysis and presentation of facts. Several of these transactions lend themselves to automation, as form based transactions with expandable fields, custom labeled fields or runtime association of different form templates for different kinds of cases and a workflow implementation with well defined process steps. Oftentimes, solutions call for analysis and synthesis of a unique set of options presented with appropriate reasoning, integrating a spectrum of views, perspectives and

 

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Operations performed, tasks executed and decisions taken are hence objective and based on evidences. Metadata structures, record management policies, indexing / classification tools, taxonomy frameworks, ontology structures along with tools to intelligently discern and exploit the context can be integrated in the design to enable knowledge capture and management to support various transactions. Contextual information does not easily get recorded by enterprise users when the systems do not enable and support them to do so. However, these are every essential to discern the reasons as to why a certain decision was taken or an action carried out. With increasing emphasis on transparency, accountability, objectivity and the need to build trust at all levels, it is critical to record contextual information. If such information is not recorded at the point in which it gets generated, it could easily be lost, fragmented or be deficient to an extent that it cannot be referenced and used later. Knowledge on enterprise operations and quality of outcomes can often be discerned with the analysis of the pattern of information transacted during the course of execution of several routine processes and hence it is important that information transacted in an enterprise is exploited during its occurrence. Reporting and Measurements on quality factors can be generated and presented within an enterprise application as updated metrics summary reports for informed decision making, as interactive dashboards or decision support systems.

Frameworks for systems development and methods adopted would need to match specific organizational situations and thereby improve their usefulness. With more insights, experience and exposure, it would be possible to re-model and redesign processes as also the architecture of the enterprise solutions, to ensure better quality of outcomes. These improvements can arise as a result of enforcing in the systems, process discipline, implementing ingenious features and system capability to alert, notify or provide information for decision support, engage users more intensively and help him in performance of tasks more efficiently. It would thus be appropriate to think in terms of a process maturity framework and assess the state of current level of preparedness and system capability.

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5. Discerning Levels of Trust from Deviant conditions, System Operative Modes and Transaction metrics

Monitoring and control of systems with an insight on the levels of trust that are prevalent in an enterprise, can be ascertained by recognizing deviant conditions inferred from transaction metrics, measures or other deficiency patterns. Corrective interventions can be implemented to respond to such deviant conditions. Efforts to enhance levels of trust and the quality of interactions, feedback and problem solving interventions can be initiated or completed to bring the system under control conditions. A number of intervention mechanisms can be pursued for building trust, depending upon the nature of the problem, the severity of problem, whether long term or short term solutions are sought to be achieved, the sustainability of the change desired, whether the intervention needs to include measures to minimize the occurrence of similar problem again and so on. Hence, it would be desirable to conceptualize – what may be termed as ‘Trust Deficit Indicators (TDI)’ or ‘System Operative Modes (SOM)’ which signify a set of coherent states, depicting the health of the systems and characterizing the levels of trust form the nature of the indicative dysfunctionality or fault in the system. The nature of required corrective interventions hence, can be correlated to TDI/ SOM characteristics. The introduction of such measures, also helps reduce the dimensionality of the problem space and makes the understanding of the system behavior more intuitive and amenable for cognitive interpretations and understanding. Such metrics can also become an essential construct in the context of organizational development and for resolving problems which are complex and multidimensional. Knowledge inputs and cues presented in visual and symbolic forms, are oftentimes more effective in facilitating the identification, implementation and reinforcing of desired behavioral changes in organizations. This is because human intellect is tuned for processing visual images, figurative representations and symbolic processing of information much better than text based information and directions. The challenge however, is that cues such as TDI/ SOM that are to be presented in the workplace environment to propel action need to be context based, dynamic and generate impetus for action, besides being appealing, so as to (i) get the attention of the

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incumbent functioning in the system and (ii) create impact to evoke desired behavioral changes in incumbents. Cues like information dashboards, event triggers, alerts, system state indications, exceptions, reports, status displays, navigation aids, user tips, cross-references etc are characterizations in the problem space. Similarly, organization of elements in the environment, active warning systems, colored signs, vivid depiction of desired actions, presentation of choices or such ingenious variations impelling actions, portrayal of risk analysis, probability of successes in pursuing options, what if scenarios, solution configurations and options, mapping of model parameters or attributes to change system behaviors etc, are depictions in the solution space. Presenting cues to trigger appropriate behaviors in enterprise users require that such cues are adapted to system operation modes and user profiles. A range of abstractions, criteria, heuristics, algorithms, approaches or decision rules will require to be invoked or transacted in the selection and presentation of information and cues to the enterprise users.

Summary

Elements of formal organizational constraints such as restrictive rules and policies can affect the performance and capacity of an enterprise to leverage and transact knowledge effectively and build trust in the enterprise systems. Multicultural composition of knowledge workers, the induction of the current generation of younger talent and perceived faster ascent of capable younger talent in enterprises, potentially create an environment prone for the buildup of trust deficits, unless systems are put in place to enhance communication, engagement of workforce, elicit and handle feedback and enhance objective transparent evidence based transactions. The more insidious challenges to the buildup of trust however, are the less apparent influence of past practices, legacy systems, impersonal work systems, archaic habits, degenerative attitudes and the pervasive effects of growth in organizational size. It is important for an enterprise to focus on building trust by encouraging honest conversations, exchange of facts and relying on evidence based approaches for decision making. Effective feedback and information dissemination, enhances trust and thereby reduces conflicts, misunderstanding and misconstrued perceptions. With enhanced levels of trust, work gets done faster and work becomes more enjoyable.

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Modern organizational functioning is plagued with examples of dysfunctionalities, failure and poor strategic decision-making. These are often the result of misleading data, faulted logic, interpretation/ observation, inadequate analysis, misplaced assumptions and unsupported intuitions. The approach presented emphasizes the need for design and implementation of mechanisms for processing knowledge structures and handling transactions of information and knowledge resources for the purpose of explanation, prediction, and troubleshooting to be built in the enterprise solution that would lead to build up of trust and leveraging such trust for enhanced performances in organisations.

References

1. Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P. J., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.

2. K. Jayakumar Dynamics of Organisational Transformation and Executing Change, CSIR publication, 2011

3. K. Jayakumar Building Institutional capacities for a purposive transformative change to support eGovernance Initiatives WSIS e-GOV Forum, March 13, 2010, Geneva