Page 86 -

NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS THAT SUPPORT KNOWLEDGE WORK 75

>> CONFLICT BETWEEN ACADEMIC CONSTITUENCIES
AND CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION

During implementation team members focused on professionalizing the university’s
administrative practices in order to ensure institutional governance and mediate
financial and regulatory risk. This goal was spearheaded by the Financial Manage-
ment (FM) team leader who persuaded project members of this agenda and through
coordinated action they purposely excluded legacy grants management practices
(based on a commitment accounting approach) from the Enterprise System design
in preference for a corporate accounting approach based on time-phased budgeting
interpreted as more rigorous. This is in the FM team leader’s story:
I would say that the mentality that we’ve had . . . for managing is primitive . . . and
it’s old-fashioned . . . the corporate world left it many years ago . . . Many faculty think
of things fundamentally wrong. We want to move people towards a management
model where we’re going to ask [them] to put together a time-phased budget and
management plan.

The FM team leader went on to liken the legacy accounting approach to Quicken – a
simplistic software program for the management of personal finances:
If they don’t like it, we ought to fire ‘em – and get new users! . . . It’s a . . . retreat . . . I
taught Karate for many years – you know what? If you’re afraid to fight, you’ll never
fight! Got to decide to get up there and get hit . . . [we’re] spending millions and
millions of dollars to go forward, not to duplicate what we had . . . [Uni] needs more
than a copy of Quicken for each grant – we have 4,000 grants . . . we don’t do that
here any more. I mean – we just don’t!
The rhetoric of this story excludes the possibility of other views in favour of squashing
the old ways of working. In the interviewee’s mind, everyone should be on the same
page – sharing common aims – or they have no place at the university. The content and
tone of his message illustrates little respect for the different views across the university.
When the ERP was rolled out to the Uni community it was met with resistance
from academic administrators who were unable to inform their faculty members
about the financial details of their grant and contract awards using the time-phased
approach embedded in the ERP. Academic faculty, in turn, became deeply unhappy
about the ERP because they were unable to receive the answers they needed in
order to do their jobs effectively. At this time the project entered paralysis because
the project team was unable to gain political support from the academic depart-
ments. It is in this moment of controversy that all parties involved realize the lack
of common aims and begin to consider how they might advance their particular
interests. A dissenting central leadership voice shares his interpretation of this con-
troversy:

We took an environment that wasn’t complex and added a level of complexity that
was a 100 fold . . . in the old world people invented shadow systems around the
accounting system in order to do their jobs . . . They understood how to take faculty

6/5/09 7:01:07 AM
9780230_522015_04_cha03.indd 75 6/5/09 7:01:07 AM
9780230_522015_04_cha03.indd 75