When people become the integration layer
When people become the integration layer
If your people are constantly copying information between systems, chasing approvals and jumping between applications just to get their job done, you’ve made them the integration layer.
I saw versions of this repeatedly when I was at Salesforce talking to executives about transformation. Organisations would come looking for technology to improve a process. But when you started pulling at the thread, quite often the problem wasn’t really the technology.
They’d taken a process designed years earlier, sometimes when the organisation was much smaller and everyone worked in the same office, and made it digital. Same approvals. Same hand-offs. Same organisational assumptions. Just with more technology. Digitising a process isn’t the same as redesigning it.
I think hybrid working has made this much more visible. When everyone sat together, people filled the gaps in badly designed processes. You could turn around and ask someone a question. Somebody knew where the spreadsheet lived. Someone else knew who actually needed to approve something. Institutional knowledge became the glue holding everything together.
Take that away and suddenly people are navigating a myriad of engagement layers, notifications and SaaS applications, all competing for their attention. Perhaps hybrid working didn’t create the problem. It exposed it.
I’ve increasingly started thinking about this in three layers:
- Systems of record: where the organisation’s information and transactions live.
- Integration and automation: how information and work move between those systems.
- Systems of engagement: where people actually interact with the organisation and get work done.
Get those layers right and technology starts to disappear into the background. Get them wrong and people become the integration layer. They copy, paste, chase, reconcile and switch context. They attend another meeting because nobody can see what’s happening. Then, ironically, we buy another productivity tool to fix it.
This is why I think technology architecture and organisational design are becoming increasingly difficult to separate. We should start with how we want people to work, how information needs to flow and what governance we need around it. Then design the technology to enable that.
Because if we don’t deliberately design how work happens, our technology estate will do it for us. And I’m not convinced that’s a particularly good way to design an organisation.
