People and Organizations

Foundations for a people centric view on organizations

Organizations exist because there are people out there to deal with, and staff to do it. People, people and more people, this is all it is about: people dealing with organizations (people in a particular framework) and people dealing with other people.

People expect respect, fairness, commitment and value from their dealings with organizations. But this is double edged knife. Organizations need to organize themselves in another fashion: they need to know how to identify the people and how tune the way to interact correctly and build reliable relationships. 

Keeping good demographics and biometrics record practices have allowed secure identification of people, either public or private, with reliable credentiation in the digital and in the “bricks” realms. But people identity is a much broader issue and cover a much fuzzier world: your multiple accounts in multiple organizations all contribute to your identity, giving you access to different layers of service and trust is something that needs to be validated all the time.

People are connected by heterogeneous and asymmetric networks which impacts each person in different but effective ways. Can a company not protect its brands in the social networks? So, when someone reaches a portal or a store in the mall he may bring with him all that gossip, recommendations and prejudice he digested. Informed clients are good tough ones.

Clients, Citizens, Individuals, Agents, Associates, you name it, all well-known hats, are roles that define the way organizations “deal” with people. Getting a driving license tends to be a very different thing to buying a book online so the government organization involved don’t have the same approach as the retailer.

In a people centric approach, it only makes sense to focus on the “people dealing” of a particular organization if we understand correctly the roles people play, their motivations, expectations, practices, capabilities and resources. You have to know your clients. A hard task, particularly if you want to register and share it correctly.

People react very differently to an organization if they have to deal with it or if they want to deal with it. How different it is to deal with the Tax authorities or deal with a video streaming company! I will call the first type “hard” and the second “soft”. The cognitive and emotional resources involved in “hard” and “soft” situations are so different that the interactions have to be different (the channel mix), the relationship establishment is made with diverse bonds (trust, integrity, urbanity, law, compliance, value, citizenship…) and the resulting business processes are dramatically different.

The funny thing is that sometimes a “soft” situation gets into a “hard” one. You buy a nice gadget and two weeks later it gets broken and customer service comes into play. Then you witness the traditional schizophrenia: one company two different personalities. Not nice.

Failing to recognize the “soft”/”hard” nature of the people organizations has been in the deep root cause of multiple well intentioned disasters we have seen, such as expensive CRM initiatives that under deliver and inappropriate channel mix that destroy value.

When organizations deal with people sometimes they collect a lot of data. Demographics and other structured and unstructured data and metadata describing each particular person are basic. This “client file” is one of the most abused objects in all organizations. I’ve seen “client files” so rich that included coding all sorts of client behaviors, attributes and traits, offering an immense field for analysis and prediction about their customers.

People are related/connected to other people and to other organizations. Family ties, employment ties, citizenship ties, membership, and many others reflect a network that is sometimes social, other times contractual, sometimes public, sometimes intimate. So, for each role a person plays with an organization, there is a complex tree reflecting the hierarchy of people and organizations, that when exists and is reliable gives a tremendous power to the “client file”. Intelligent analysis can show amazing hidden knowledge about people.

Sometimes organizations also register the business process and transactions data that are consequence of people dealing with the organization. So, for each person in the records they’ve got the resulting processes/transactions. Let’s call it the “deal file”.

But between the “client file” and “deal file” something tends to be missing: they know something of the person (the “client file”) and something he/she wants (the “deal file”) but they don’t know much about what was done by the person, actions that, at the end of the day, resulted in the process/transaction. What emails did the organization sent and received on that context, did the person showed on the store/office, did it logged in the portal and what was done. So, if they register the way people interact with the organization (on the many available channels) we obtain a behavioral record which contains much knowledge about how people do business with the organization. This is the “interaction file” that, although often neglected and a hard nut to crack, is one of the richest datasets an organization can access.

Intelligent analysis of that data is a whole industry in itself. One of the first approaches have been to look at people data and put them in pots: those that do this, those that own that, those that want this, those that buy that… Clustering, segmenting, evaluating, scoring, filtering, mining for patterns and trends and many other algorithms in an attempt to predict behaviors and act accordingly. For instance, financial organizations that may benefit from couple divorce (doubling the number of mortgages, for instance) may put you in the “potential divorcee pot” because you are married and reaching a critical anniversary; then they can inspect regularly your banking activities with them until they are sure you are finally divorced: in that moment they may suddenly propose you the “Just divorced package”.

Orchestrating the processes (People Management, Interaction Management, Relationship Management) that own those 3 files have been called CRM, a business philosophy that soon became incorporated into software applications. Implementing those platforms is prone to failure due to resistance to change and to the immense impacts it has on most of other processes and platforms. But it pays to do it right!