Recently the Sausage Factory was stimulated by an incursion of potential communication. Workers at all levels and of all persuasions were being invited to join a new and user friendly social networking medium called Yammer. Yammer was designed by some as-yet-unsung genius specifically to facilitate communication and innovative cooperation within large organisations. Each Yammer domain is restricted to the people who have an email address with the particular organisation they work for. So Sausage Factory workers, who all have an email address of the form name.name@sausage.gov.au, would be able to create a blog or discussion group that could be seen only by other denizens of the Sausage Factory. It's a bit like a mini Facebook for factories.
Well the glorious light of enlightenment and potentially creative spontaneity lasted for less than a week really before being unceremoniously snuffed out. Access to Yammer from within the Sausage Factory was simply removed without any discussion; "the page cannot be displayed" is the only message anybody has ever got about this.
For those of us who have been struggling for ages to get some kind of discussion forum and networking facility into existence because we really need it for the kind of work we do, this experience is just one more definitive demonstration that the honchos of Bangers R Us are way out of touch with the workforce; in the area where I work it is particularly dysfunctional. Even though the main purpose of the area is public contact for the provision of advice and support to all the meat and stuffing suppliers, and the Factory has various slogans about treating people fairly with personalised service tailored to their particular needs, the largely unspoken but emphatically imposed practice is to enforce a tightly scripted, prepackaged set of "products" with a very 'one size ought to fit all' flavour [so to speak]. The phone staff in the main contact area of the factory must follow the dictates of an on-line information dispensing system which is essentially a gigantic recipe book. A recipe book without an index or table of contents, by the way [I kid you not!], and which furthermore does not have a search function of any significance. Can you imagine that? An on-line system which purports to be an all encompassing knowledge base and yet we cannot search for content; we cannot get to the actual page we want by searching! All the "search" facility does is indicate which "chapter" the information is in.
It is like someone giving you what they say is a map of a city but all it does is offer you a choice of which major road to start on; which city gate to go in through. But wait, there's more! Because this so called "industry standard" tool does not have "breadcrumbs"; there is no facility providing a a record of the path you followed to get where you did, all there is is the browser back button and history.
But I digressed didn't I. The issue is that often we come up against new situations which are not covered by the 'scripting'. Well it stands to reason that you can't fit the universe of sausage making into a neat little box, so there are often times when we need to do a bit of troubleshooting and innovative problem solving. That requires communicating with other people to see if someone else has already solved this new problem. May be it is just a case of knowing where the information is hiding. But the Sausage Factory honchos seem to have a profound aversion to front-line workers doing anything except "OBEY!" The real policy is Economies of Scale Through Specialisation of Function and total control from the Centre. It is as if nobody at the Sausage Factory has understood why the Soviet Union fell to bits!
Yammer had the potential to become a really useful networking facility, but it was squashed in the Sausage Factory with no discussion and presumably therefore with no recognition of the creative potential it could unleash. The impression we front-line workers get is that The Chief Sausage Maker and his trusted offsiders do NOT trust us.
