Rationalisation is a never-ending process: existing reporting processes and coordination tools are partial because too conventional

Early October 2001, the head of the booking call centre of a major French tour operator receives a congratulation letter from the Chairman of the board of directors. The reason for such an exceptional letter is the very high level of the activity of the service. The head of the booking call centre is embarrassed because the team was not busy at registering new clients but was assaulted by existing clients who where canceling their travels. The metrics evaluating activity where build on the assumption that if people call this centre it is to book a travel, not to cancel it. With 9/11, this assumption proved false and all the reporting system generated and cascaded a false representation of operations.
This example is particular but it highlights pretty well the reality of reporting and coordination processes in organisations. They are partial and they are conventional. People use ratios, KPIs, balanced score-cards but they hardly review the definitions and guidelines that detail the assumptions behind. Some even play with them, taking advantage of them to hide things and gain autonomy. In both cases, they contribute to senior management blindness. They contribute to management errors and underperformance.
What does that mean? Certainly not that we have to fall into paranoia and transform the reporting and coordination systems into panopticon. This means we have to constantly question, enrich, adapt and amend the metrics so that it reflects more carefully the activity. Simply because the activity is constantly evolving, in particular to cope with competition and innovation. The so famous “what you can’t measure, you can’t manage’ and “the one vision of the truth” call for agility, not rigidity. Management accounting is not bind to the strict standards of Accountancy.
What is the benefit for social computing? It shall prevent organisations use conventional and non-relevant metrics to evaluate social computing. It shall motivate people who introduce social computing build locally relevant metrics that enrich the existing set of metrics.