Organizational Media Design

Davis Foulger
Updated January, 2005

There is an opportunity to develop a new curriculum in the intersection of Organizational Communication, Communication Technology, and other specializations within the field of communication. Communication departments are, I believe, uniquely positioned to teach this curriculum, which fills a distinctive niche that should be of growing importance in the future. The opportunity is associated with corporate process re-engineering, an increasingly important activity in many companies are transforming their businesses by changing the the way they manage business processes. The most common forms of process reengineering use computer mediated communication systems to replace paper and face-to-face decision making with electronic workflows. The overriding goals, in general, are a combination of increased productivity, modified corporate culture, and a better audit trail of decision making. The latter goal has become more important, recently, in the wake of financial scandels and Sarbanes-Oxley

The first goal of process re-engineering, increased productivity, is hardly a new one. It has its roots in the hundred year old tradition of Scientific Management and the principles of organization championed initially by Frederick Taylor. We generally teach these principles early in Organizational Communication courses just before we teach the more communication focused traditions of the Human Relations and Human Resources schools. The concept of process re-engineering is generally far more extensive, and generally far less rigorous, than Taylor's time and motion studies. I have been involved in a number of process engineering efforts. Most often I have acted in the role of "system architect", which is to say that it was my job to turn a set of requirements that had been gathered by a business process expert and turn them into a design that could be implemented by a programming team, and deployed by business process management. The implementation would often involve integrating a set of pre-existing pieces (workflow, groupware, document processing, database, and other software components) to create a process specific medium of communication (a "designer medium", if you will).

The most important skills associated with the implementation of systems like these are generally taught in computer science and information systems departments. Most of the rest of the skills associated with such design aren't taught anywhere. Requirements gathering is most often done by management professionals who know a lot about managing people, budgets, resources, and schedules, but often don't know very much about engineering communication processes. They most often gather their requirements information from the managers responsible for the processes rather than the people who perform the processes or do the decision making. They often have only ad hoc knowledge of the technologies that can be used in the implementation. They are often unaware of nuance in the existing process, and often leave critical features out of the re-engineered process. They presume, much as any classic manager out of the scientific management tradition might, that they can impose their solution on the old process, yet they have often moved on to a different project before their requirements are implemented or deployed.

The reality of most business processes is that they aren't formally designed. They simply happen, often growing more complex in increments as flaws are uncovered in existing processes. Weick describes this process as sensemaking, an iterative enactment of process in which we try to maintain stable processes, but periodically encounter obstacles which we have to adapt to. It is usually the people who actually enact the process that making these incremental changes, often by simply trying things out and sticking with the first solution that works well enough to solve the problem. There are formal processes for evalating and implementing such changes. In the best known of these processes, Deming's Quality Circles and the ISO9000 Continuous Improvement standard, the people who enact the process evaluate and attempt to improve it by carefully tracking performance measures, studying ways in which those performance measures might be improved, and acting changes through a consensus decision making process. Business process re-engineering takes a more radical approach by designing entire new processes to replace old ones. When it fails, it is often because the process re-engineers neither fully understood the process they were replacing nor the communication principles that must be supported in almost any business process:

The field of communication is well positioned to teach people how to research, specify, architect, deploy, and administer these re-engineered processes. To do this, we need to build a curriculum that doesn't just study new media, but provides tools for:

We know how to teach all of these things. What we have not done in the past is to embrace the kind of proactive mindset a program like this entails. I have twice created proposals for undergraduate course sequences in the area I now refer to as Organizational Media Design. The first, which included the courses Comparative Media, Mediated Interpersonal Communication, and Designing Media, was envisioned as a three course sequence in new media technologies. The second, which included the courses Communication Technology and Media, Communication Infrastructure, and Organizational Media Architecture, was proposed as a part of an interview sequence at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I also outlined an masters degree program in the area for San Antonio and am currently working on a description for a certificate program (for another school). Five of the six undergraduate courses associated outlined above are described on this page.

I increasingly regard the courses on this page as a four or five course sequence that might be taught at either the undergraduate or graduate level. Clearly the expectations would be higher at the masters or Ph.D. level, and other courses (see my outline of what a masters degree program might look like) would be required. There is a substantial possibility that a program in this area would be sensibly taught on an interdisciplinary basis (with business, computer science, information technology, and perhaps other departments/schools)

Comparative Media
Proposed as an introductory course in a sequence on new media, this course is focused on giving students a broad understanding of communication media, old and new, such that they can reasonably evaluate new media. I want students to come out of this course understanding the different kinds of media, the ways in which media of different kinds are similar and different, the reasons why they are different, and the value associated with those differences. The course directly extends the primary themes of a book I am currently writing: Characteristics of Media: the message beneath. I will be teaching a variant of this course, using chapters from Characteristics of Media, as a Masters-level seminar in Spring, 2005. In an undergraduate sequence I can envision a variant of this course as either a large lecture freshman course that introduces students to the wide variety of ways in which people communicate with each other or a smaller sophomore level course that explores the media systems within which we use language to create and consume messages. Indeed, one might readily imagine a three or four sequence in comparative media that would have value in a range of specialties, including media management, public relations, education, law, and organizational management.
Communication Technology and Media
Designed as an introduction to the communication technologies which one might use in designing, building, maintaining, or administering media systems. The focus is on communication technologies, old and new, and the media they make possible. This is a particularly rich course for me from a research perspective, as it forces me to continually confront the intersection between technologies, the media they make possible, the things we use media to accomplish, and the ways in which people adapt media to their needs. It is a particularly rich course for students insofar as they learn the construction materials with which our communication systems are built and obtain some minimal experience in using them (to build a trivial interactive medium using stock parts). I have yet to teach this course, but it introduces and directly extends the primary themes of a book I have outlined and plan to write soon: Building Time, Space, and Scale Machines: the Invention and Evolution of Media. I envision this as a sophomore level course.
Communication Infrastructure
Designed as an intermediate level course in a sequence on communication technologies, this course focuses on one of the most fundamental building blocks of electronic and computer-mediated communication systems, the channels of communication through which messages physically flow as they move from one person to another. There is an entire discipline of architecture, network architecture, that is focused entirely on this problem. This course introduces students to this discipline, the specific component parts that need to be understood in order to master it, and gives them practice building toy network infrastructures. These infrastructures are a major subcomponent of my theory of media invention and evolution. This course is the most likely in this sequence to compete with existing courses in Computer Science or Information Technology, and may be usefully specified as a corequisite from those departments. The focus in the source is not programming, however. It is understanding the infrastructures and workflows that provide the fabric of any communication system. This aspect of the course will likely distinguish it from courses in Computer Science (although perhaps not from the Information Technology course work associated with Library Science programs). I envision this as a junior level course that prereqs Communication Technology and Media.
Designing Media and Organizational Media Architecture
Designing Media was initially proposed as an upper division course in a new media sequence as SUNY Oswego. Organizational Media Architecture was proposed as the upper division course in the sequence at San Antonio. The two course proposals are similar in concept. Both focus on giving students the knowledge and skills needed in order to implement a medium of communication. The difference in the courses that may usefully distinguish them is the orientation each has to the implementation process. Designing Media focuses on the problem of creating an computer-mediated communication system using off the shelf parts (e.g. with little or no programming) that solves a communication problem. Its intent is to make students competent creators of interactive web site components that support site interaction, distributed workflows, and/or electronic commerce. The focus is more on creating a medium that is useful to people than it is to teaching requirements-based development process that is more typically associated with organizational process reengineering. Organizational Media Architecture, by contrast, is directly oriented to training students to act in an intermediate role in organizational process reengineering efforts. The intent is to train students to be effective intermediaries in this process, acting in such roles as requirements engineer, application architect, project manager, and system administrator. Both courses would train students in the processes of requirements collection, scenario development, and communication system design. The former course would provide a focus on off the shelf groupware, workflow, and other components that can be configured to solve simple communication problems. The latter course would provide an additional focus on the consulting process and its requisite interaction with both the managers who request such projects and the technical experts who implement them. These courses are a direct extension of both my research program on the structure of media and experience(at IBM and elsewhere; see my hypermedia resume for details of this work) in these roles. The most interesting research opportunity posed by this course is the exploration of organizational media design patterns: the systematic ways in which different organizational systems satisfy different sets of business rules with similar workflow solutions. I have some preliminary research done in this area and I expect that at least one student assignment would extend this work.
 

This proposal originates in a Spring, 2004 conversation with Stuart Sigman (Dean at Emerson College). In that conversation he reflected that my research program may be difficult for departments to understand because, in its focus on media invention and evolution, it is proactive in a field that remains largely reactive. That comment triggered a conversation among a growing number of other scholars in the field of communication whose research bear directly on issues of media design and who are interested in expanding our field's curricular offerings in the area. This description is a step in that dialog.