Building a kitchen

I work for an IT company designing and implementing software systems for large companies. The following was an analogy that I put together for one engagement to explain why the request we were asked for was not as simple as the customer expected. The work itself was to introduce a new point of sale application to their retail stores. The old system was a "green-screen" interface to an ancient main frame which was also used to manage their repairs centre.

"Our clients intend to renovate their kitchen. They have bought a set of modular units from Ikea and have hired us to put it in place in their house. Their existing kitchen has only the one row of cupboards with the bench-top and the fridge stuck in the corner. The new set of units contains a proper pantry, work-table and a set of drawers.

The project is currently at the stage of working out how the modules should be arranged in the space available so that it can be used the way that they intend. The trouble that we are running into is that they believe everything they need is “out of the box”. It is - mostly - but the box is a flat pack and the pieces need to be screwed together and fitted together in the most efficient layout. We have our screw-drivers and hex keys in hand but need to know which units go next to each other and what the most common activities in the kitchen will be. And plumbing and wiring were never going to be provided with the kitchen units.

For instance – we have been asked to make sure that there is a power outlet near the cutlery drawer. Fair enough, but why? So that it is not necessary to move around much while making a cup of coffee. It turns out that in the current kitchen the coffee is kept on the bench next to the kettle and the cups are in the cupboard underneath, while the teaspoons are across the room. The client believes that having power near the drawer will allow them to have all these things in one place. BUT – in the new kitchen, the cups will be in a cupboard above the bench and the coffee will be kept in the pantry.

If we follow the request to the letter, it will not solve the underlying problem. So we need to understand the *actual* requirement is not to have the power near the spoons but to make it easy to put together a cup of coffee without travelling all over the room. Extracting this requirement from what the customer *thinks* they want is the skill of the designer.

At the same time – we also need to take into account things that the customer doesn’t even think of. The pantry should be near the main entry point so that groceries don’t have to travel far, and the fridge should ideally be against an outside wall for energy efficiency reasons.

One of complications to all this is that our client has had everything laid out in the old kitchen in logical relation to how it is used. With only a single set of cupboards there is no logical grouping according to purpose, but grouping according to task. Hence food is kept next to the utensils used to prepare it and implements next to where they are used.

The off-the-shelf replacement has a completely different, though equally valid, justification for where everything is placed. And that layout is implicit in the structure of the cupboards such that altering will mean cutting and patching the packaged components.

There is also another issue is the customer has also been doing repair work on the kitchen table and keeping the tools and parts in the cupboards and drawers along with the cutlery and plates. Part of our job is therefore to put together a workshop - which should be, of course, in a separate room. I am expecting this separation to also cause some angst, and I am going to have to have some discussion with our team since the same modules (cupboards) will be used for the workshop as for the kitchen. Most of the tradesmen won’t understand why they need to kept as separate as I intend them to be."

Corporate memory

Every organisation, from its inception and throughout its existence, gathers knowledge about its business environment and about its internal operations. In most cases, this knowledge resides in the minds of the people which make up the organisation: the company direction may be held in the head of the CEO, while the correct way to process a claim form is maintained by finance clerks.

All of this information constitutes the organisation’s knowledge base. It may be considered a sort of ‘corporate memory’. Every structured group of people – from the local football club through to nations and global communities – has a corporate memory. In the former case it may be statistics and a set of stories about past greats. In the latter it is comprised of the history and cultural behaviours. In all cases this collective knowledge guides the behaviour of members.

However, the structure of most corporate memories is extremely messy to say the least. In many (most?) cases it is not formally structured or even recognised as a valuable resource. Pieces of information are scattered in many different brains and a thousand documents. Cross-connections rely on random coagulations of data by the members of the group and random associations based on past knowledge.

Entry into any group will always involve some induction or initiation procedure whereby one is introduced to the corporate memory. These processes go by such names as ‘training’, ‘induction’, ‘gaining experience’ and ‘mentoring’ [This is the subject of an entirely other field of study known as ‘teaching’]. There will also be some method for propagating knowledge amongst existing members, although this is commonly less controlled and often completely unmanaged. Compare how much organisational knowledge is gained through rumour and gossip as opposed to reading formal documents.

Mechanisms for passing on knowledge amongst existing vary greatly. There is some that is passed along in sound-bites; a mode designed to ensure that everyone in the organisation has at least a passing understanding. The corporate vision or mission statement is usually of this kind. [The fallacy in this is that just because everyone has heard the mission statement, company values or corporate vision doesn’t mean that they have understood or believe it. The normal response is to simply repeat the same statement it over and over again. Advertisers also use this approach with marginally more success.] At the other extreme are regulations and policies which may run to hundreds of pages – and which are rarely read.

As an organisation becomes larger and more established, knowledge is nailed down in a set of pre-defined processes and procedures such as templates, check-lists, instruction manuals or forms. All these may be considered as conditioned responses to specific stimulus by the corporate organism. Hence small or young organisations have less standard processes and procedures to define their actions. They have had less time or opportunity to learn and react to troublesome situations. On the other hand large organisations can go too far in this direction and institute so many hard and fast rules that they restrict any variation or flexibility away from THE fixed process. Deciding where and when tight rules are required and when loose guidelines should be implemented is not easy.

A formal knowledge base, attempts to resolve some of the issues surrounding the normal diffuse nature of the corporate memory. It does not (and cannot) expect to contain all the disparate knowledge which may be contained within the organisation. However, it should provide a first point of call for any member of a group to find out about anything relevant to the group.