1/13 – Transparency Brad Lear

The road to agility is paved with information.1

Transparency is the notion that engaging the whole organization in decision

making processes will make an organization more productive. When posed in a
government secured area the proposition becomes more complex with the stakes being
higher than normal. “The entry fee is a ubiquitous, secure, robust, trusted, protected,
and routinely used wide bandwidth net that is populated with the information and
information services that [we] need.”1 It becomes evident that a leader within this kind
of environment cannot simply choose to have transparency in their organization, it has
to be carefully woven in.
It has only been recently that our company has allowed access to sites like
Facebook and LinkedIn, even though they are restricted to essentially to be like read-
only sites. And that’s in the unclassified realm. In the black world, there is only a
central WAN with no access to the outside world, so transparency takes on a whole new
meaning when it comes to trying to implement change involving transparency using new
media and tools that enhance and bolster transparency. In a need-to-know
organization, where information is closely held for reasons of national security, trying to
get people to open up is a sensitive subject. The organization I operate in choose to
use transparency more in a face-to-face setting than in an electronic setting, but there
are small steps taking place to allow for greater transparency. Just recently we have
been given the opportunity to use Microsoft’s LiveMeeting to have cooperative
conference calls and presentations, where before such a thing was out of the question.
So while the company is making strides towards transparency, they are quite small and
measured strides. In my small piece of the organization I have been able to implement
normal business rhythm meetings that aim to get not only stake-holders, but people up
and down the chain of command in the same room to ensure everyone is on the same
page. I hold a weekly status meeting that has everyone from directors to technicians
and even our customer in the same room to ensure that any information that needs to
be passed along reach the people actually performing the work. It also allows for the
people doing the work to voice concerns or ideas about their jobs, of which we’ve had
many great ideas that have lead to very productive change. One of the ideas that the
integration director had after listening to technician and customer complaints was to
implement a software tool that would allow for the electronic completion and
reconciliation of paperwork in the high-bays of which we are currently running a
promising pilot program. This new tool allows anyone on the network to see exactly
where we are in an operation which lends itself to a lot more transparency for the
customer to see at any time where we are versus where we said we would be.
Although our work structure is relatively unique, we are finding ways to instill
transparency in our work.
If we are able to introduce transparency into our organization we will see great
productivity and efficiency gains. However, the risk of adding these tools to impart
transparency lend themselves to a greater security risk. The last thing our organization
would want is to end up on a website like WikiLeaks and endanger the citizens of our
country and the warfighters protecting us overseas; but I think if we take tactful,
measured steps we will be able to successfully add transparency to our little world. The
payoff will certainly pay dividends for our customer and our stockholders.

1) David Alberts, Richard Hayes; Power To The Edge: Command and Control in the
Information Age; CCRP Publication Series; http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Alberts_Power.pdf;
2005