Quality and Innovation

In a previous article I covered the Kearns Six Facet Model as a way to understand what technology management is all about. Universities with technology management programs also offer definitions, including these from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and the University of Trieste in Italy.

South Dakota School of Mines & Technology – Technology management as a hybridized curriculum of management science, operations research, and MBA. Stuart Kellogg (the original guy who got me interested in this subject!) characterizes technology management in terms of three axes: interpersonal and team skills, applications, and theory. He describes the model at http://graded.sdsmt.edu/academics/programs/tm/:

An individual with a background in business administration is likely to be very good at managing resources, developing budgets, and implementing decisions based on sound economics. However, many do not have the necessary background in the appropriate technology or the quantitative decision tools necessary to effectively manage that technology.

An individual specializing in operations research will almost certainly have the background necessary to model systems and develop quantitative decision tools needed to manage that system. However, they may not have the management or business background necessary to effectively implement a solution to a problem. Management science attempts to apply the quantitative decision tools developed in operations research in an industrial or business environment. As such, it is more applications and modeling oriented. However, managers with a strong background in management science may lack of the business tools and supervisory skills necessary for today’s business climate.

Technology Management is an attempt to effectively integrate decision theory with business, management, and organizational skills necessary to effectively manage in today’s business environment. Because of this integration, technology management programs remain popular with corporations operating in a technical or global environment.

University of Stuttgart – Technology management as integrated planning, design, and optimization. The University of Stuttgart says that technology management “comprises the integrated planning, design, and optimization of technical products and processes under consideration of human factors, organizational aspects, technological solutions, and the environment.”

University of Trieste – Technology management is the effective management of technological change. The University of Trieste defines technology management as “the effective management of technological change… in order to survive, an organization must change its offering and how it creates and delivers it [innovation], and do so on a continuing basis.” The process of technology management includes: scanning the environment for signals (e.g. identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – SWOT), acquiring technology, implementing technology, and review, learning and feedback.

Is your body programmed to get cancer? How about Parkinson’s, or multiple sclerosis, or diabetes? With 23andme.com, you could find out if you are predisposed to these or 19 other diseases simply by spitting in a cup. In addition, you can easily donate your data to further medical research. These are the same kinds of tests used to diagnose cystic fibrosis and Down’s syndrome prenatally, and have earned a measure of trust within the medical community. Now, genetic testing is a service offered to just about anyone – even outside the hospital or doctor’s office. (It’s not free, but what’s $399 for a little peace of mind – assuming that’s what you end up with?)

That’s not where the fun ends, though. If you’d like to meet other people who share similar genetic characteristics, no problem – one someone writes a mashup between a social networking site like Facebook and your 23andme genome data, it will be as easy as adding a new tab to “My Networks”.

Diagnosing genetic profiles is a high-stakes game for two reasons: quality and ethics. The quality of the genetic testing procedures, the calibration of the lab instruments, and the handling of the samples are all aspects of the process that must be carefully controlled. Failures can result in minor consequences (e.g. a sample is lost and the subject has to spit in a second cup, then wait longer to get the results) or major consequences (someone is incorrectly told that they are predisposed to a life-threatening condition, and because they can’t bear to get it, they commit suicide). Fortunately, quality control is taken very seriously in this domain, as the QC process from Kalman et al. (2005) indicates.

The ethical issues can be a direct result of the capability of the process to produce accurate and reliable results. But is it appropriate to offer this service on such a large scale? What are the consequences of knowing versus not knowing, on both a personal scale and on the scale of society? Without probing these issues in more depth, and understanding how laws and regulations could counterbalance potentially austere social consequences, it’s a risky service to offer. Some people might be able to handle the information; some might not. (Imagine being in high school and getting dumped by someone who checked your genome, found out you’re predisposed to psoriasis, and thinks that’s gross.)

I’m not sure how I would respond personally to having such information, assuming that it was accurate and my sample wasn’t swapped in the lab with someone else’s. But the concept is interesting enough that I just might try their demo and explore the genomes of the Mendels, a hypothetical family.

---

Kalman, L., Chen, B., & Boone, J. (2005). The genetic testing quality control materials program (GTQC) – a sustainable community process to improve availability of appropriate, verified quality control (QC) materials for genetic testing.
Kotler, S. (2008). Spitomics: Spit-in-a-cup genomics has arrived: now what? Science Progress, 10/28/2008.

One of the most critical skills that a technology manager can have – or any manager, really – is the ability to interpret data and assess whether or not it reflects reality. Why is this important? Because good managers base their decisions at least in part on data, so the quality of the decision is often related to the quality of the data on which the decision is based. (One of the tenets of Six Sigma, for example, is “data-driven decision making”.)

So what if you were basing a decision on the quality of the election polls currently being conducted? Six Sigma experts and practitioners, take note: today’s election polls offer up a really effective lesson on threats to validity which, if human subjects are ever a part of your quality improvement efforts, you need to be aware of these sorts of issues:

[Poll results and margins of error work] pretty well if you’re interested in hypothetical colored balls in hypothetical giant urns, or survival rates of plants in a controlled experiment, or defects in a batch of factory products. It may even work well if you’re interested in blind cola taste tests. But what if the thing you are studying doesn’t quite fit the balls & urns template?

• What if 40% of the balls have personally chosen to live in an urn that you legally can’t stick your hand into?
• What if 50% of the balls who live in the legal urn explicitly refuse to let you select them?
• What if the balls inside the urn are constantly interacting and talking and arguing with each other, and can decide to change their color on a whim?
• What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you?
• What if you’ve been hired to count balls by a company who has endorsed blue as their favorite color?
• What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue?
• What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which color they want to be?

If one or more of the above statements are true, then the formula for margin of error simplifies to:

Margin of Error = Who the hell knows?

Because, in this case, so-called scientific “sampling error” is completely meaningless, because it is utterly overwhelmed by unmeasurable non-sampling error. Under these circumstances “margin of error” is a fantasy, a numeric fiction masquerading as a pseudo-scientific fact.

Read the whole article at http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/10/balls-and-urns.html. It’s a winner. (And thanks, Mary Pat, for posting this on Facebook.)

The best definition for technology that I’ve found comes from the dictionary:

• Technology - The sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)

The phrase “social groups” acknowledges that people are a critical part of developing and
applying technology. “Provide themselves” indicates that technology is closely linked to the context
in which it is used, and deals with artifacts that people or systems create. “Material objects” implies
tangible artifacts or outcomes (e.g. processes, products, tools). And because civilization is defined as
an “advanced state of human society,” technology, therefore, is concerned with advancing human capabilities.

Using this definition as a baseline, note that quality systems (e.g. ISO 9000, CMMI, even David Allen’s GTD!) are technologies, and social networks are a foundational concept for both quality and innovation to take root.

Technology management is the combination of science, engineering and management knowledge and practice, with technology as the central means of wealth and value creation. (Khalil, 2000) This definition can nicely coexist with any of the historical definitions of management covered in a previous post.

Kearns et al. (2005) has attempted to make the connections between general management and technology management more explicit, by developing a model to describe the spheres of influence of the technology manager. The “Six Facets Model” illustrates that technology management is an integrative, multidisciplinary field, focused on effective problem solving:

• Product and Process Integration through systems thinking, quality management system development, and benchmarking (for example)
• Evaluation (at the organizational, technical and personal levels)
• Planning (including strategic plans, work plans, and environmental assessment)
• Implementation of quality systems, documentation systems, organizational processes, software, project execution, project planning and control
• Change Management involving both management and leadership of change
• Training and Engagement to cultivate individual and organizational capabilities, and promote workforce development

Additionally, in all of these areas, technology managers must remember that communications and networking have been identified as important mechanisms for actively implementing change.

There are also alternatives to the Kearns Six Facet Model that you can read about here.

---

Kearns, M.B. et al. (2005). The six facets model: technology management in the effective implementation of change. International Journal of Innovation & Technology Management, 2, 77-100.
Khalil, T. (2000). Management of technology: competitiveness and wealth creation.

A wide variety of definitions of “management” have been employed over the past century. Most of these definitions describe what managers do, with more recent research providing definitions that have emerged from exploring these managerial activities in the context of what results managers achieve. Over 25 years ago in 1982, Warren Bennis estimated that over 350 definitions of management had been proposed, all in the context of leadership, and all with some degree of “correctness”. This illustrates that there are many different ways to look at what management really is!

The perceived role of managers has converged substantially over the past several decades. Fayol (1949) identified the four behaviors of planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling as central to the task of management. Mintzberg (1973), as part of his doctoral dissertation, studied a collection of real engineers and managers to figure out the primary functions of the management role, and the jobs that managers actually did. He found that managers performed tasks in three basic areas: interpersonal communications, information gathering and assessment, and decision making. Kotter (1982), unsatisfied by the limitations of this study, followed up by observing a group of CEOs in their natural habitat. He found that social networking was not only the key activity of managers at the executive level, but the primary way in which they were able to execute and achieve their agendas. Luthans (1988) studied the results from all of his predecessors, and against the backdrop of a new data set, found that there were elements of accuracy in all of the prior definitions. He concluded that Fayol’s “traditional management” was complemented in the modern workplace by “people management” – followed by Mintzberg’s communications, and Kotter’s networking.

According to Kotter (2007), management is “the structured process of creating order amid complexity.” He contrasts his definition with a view of leadership as systemically inspiring a social group towards change within a dynamic external environment. This is consistent with the Burns (1978) view of transformational leadership as a combination of idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, individualized attention, and inspirational vision.

---

Bennis, W. (1982). What is leadership?
Burns (1978). Leadership.
Fayol, H. (1949). General and industrial management.
Kotter, J.P. (1982). The general managers.
Mintzberg, H. (1973). The nature of managerial work.

The title above comes from a Newsweek article published on October 14, 2008. The moral of the story is that recent research in neuroscience indicates that use of modern technology – in particular Web searching – actually exercises the decision making and complex reasoning parts of the brain. The end result is that younger people who are more attuned to life in cyberspace have more finely developed skills in these areas, whereas those who are not as steeped in the web are better at social skills and reading emotions from facial expressions.

“The more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become.”

Gary Small, who leads a research team at UCLA, recently published an article in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry that explains these finding in depth, and suggests that a “simple task like searching the web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults.” What does this news have to do with managing your organization? It helps you understand how to manage change by pointing out that certain activities can be strategically applied to develop specific parts of the brain.

These phenomena are comprehensively explained in the 400+ pages of Schwartz & Begley (2002). By studying obsessive-compulsive disorder, Schwartz learned about how the brain rewires itself to deal with problems and heal from wounds and uncovered much of the theory that’s being refined and developed by researchers like Small.

One of the lessons from this tome is that “practice really does make perfect”. You should give your employees time to build their capabilities and continually refine their skills – try not to rush them. “We have the ability to bring will and thus attention to bear on a single nascent possibility struggling to be born in the brain, and thus to turn that possibility into actuality and action.” There is a biological basis underlying the idea that people need the time to focus to turn an idea into action.

---

Schwartz, J.M & Begley, S. (2002). The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force New York: Harper Perennial.