Ownership, responsibility and accountability (ORA)

This is a subject close to my heart and something I expect I will bang on about from time to time. One of my personal responsibilities is the commercial development and distribution of an eprocurement solution called iPOS for SunSystems. Some time ago I was asked to attend a meeting with a client that was complaining that their purchasing policies weren't beeing adhered to by the system.

As a colleague and I probed deeper into the problem it became obvious that the issue was not system related (these things rarely are) but people and culture related. A number of senior staff had taken the "don't you know how important I am" approach to business environment change - in fact they had avoided it all together by getting their secretarial or personal assistants to perform the online approval function for purchase requisitions. These assistants were generally not capable of making the decisions about what was and wasn't appropriate for team members to purchase and hence just approved everything that popped up in the email inbox. The results spoke for themselves.

There are of course a number of technical solutions to this situation that would force the correct person to have to login to the system and perform the approval process (digital signatures, dongles, two factor authentication etc etc) however that is not the point.

ORA means that an individual owns a task to the point where it can be handed over to another (or completed) and performs the task in a responsible way - surprisingly enough in this case that does not include giving your password to someone else and then blaming them (and the computer system) when they do your job incorrectly.

In another organisation I came across the dark side of ORA - I'll come back to that another time.