Interstitial: the seam nobody owns is on your bill

Yesterday’s post¹ was about the discipline of ownership records: keeping a rigorous record of who is responsible for the things that are being used. Written down, it sounds so straightforward. In a company of fifty people, where five of them work with technology, understanding that Jack or Gene owns a particular system is easy.

Now imagine a company with 25,000 developers, grouped into different groups, different managers, different systems, teams collaborating with one another. That is where the reality of an organization that large shows itself: it is not static. It is very fluid — so fluid that every day there is a change. Some days the change is small: a particular system migrates from one team to another. Sometimes systems move with their management. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes teams get split up and there is no readout of who owns what portion of which system.

Here is one of the lessons you learn when you operate at that scale: some of the most difficult, dangerous, and unhelpful discussions start when you stop by a team and say, “Can you tell me who owns this?” That is where capacity, cost, and capability collide with internal politics (chapter 23). Ownership questions land on the seam, and the seam is where the political texture of the organization is thickest.

Sometimes a reorganization happens and no one has discussed the real ownership issues it will bring up. OK, so this system moves over here — then who is responsible for the system in between? The one that both groups pass through but neither group was reassigned to — the shared service, the boundary system, the glue (chapter 12). The teams changed; the space between them did not go anywhere, and it did not get an owner either.

If you have 25,000 employees, those are variables that can and will change, sometimes every day, and sometimes the last thing people want to think about is who owns this. That is why I want to re-emphasize one of the themes of the book: if you are running cloud capacity and cost at that scale, a big part of the job is relationships — relationships are part of the information system — understanding how to ask difficult questions, and sometimes that means going a couple of levels up and saying: hey boss, you just moved these teams around, but nobody ever made it clear who is still responsible for this system. Oh, and by the way, that system happens to be the most expensive thing that we do.

The word is interstitial

That is the word for the seam: interstitial. Standing in the space between. Interstice is the noun — the space that lies between things. The word describes exactly what happens to ownership after a reorganization: the teams moved, the systems moved, but the space between the teams — the shared service, the boundary system, the glue — stayed where it was, and nobody was reassigned to it.

You should understand the word if you are managing organizations, because there are interstices in your organization and in your bill. There are areas of your capacity and cost bill that end up being somewhat unknowable — unowned by anyone in particular. That is not a good thing. It hurts to see it with your own eyes: look at that area that no one has really thought about or owned, and those are important parts of the system that end up not having the strong ownership you would wish.

Attach a cost to the seam

When a reorganization is on the table, attach a cost to the interstitial incision — the cut that reorganization makes between teams — before it happens, and hand the seam an owner on the way through. Two things make that practical:

Keep the ownership record current through the move, not just before it. The record is only as good as its latest update, and a reorganization is exactly when updates stop happening — Bain surveyed nearly a thousand executives and employees who had been through a reorganization and found only 22% said they received sufficient support through the transition.² The book treats ownership records as part of the information system, so treat the seam the same way: the question “who is responsible for the system in between” should have an answer the day after the announcement, not weeks later. And the record needs to survive the politics of the question. Asking a team directly is exactly where the collision happens, so go up a couple of levels with the cost attached: the seam is the most expensive thing we do and, after the reorganization, it will have no owner.

Give the remainder an owner. When a move reassigns what everyone can see — the application, the team, the budget line — the remainder (the shared dependency, the boundary system, the seam itself) should be named explicitly, with an owner, in the same breath as the move. The book’s rule for grouping work applies here: give the remainder an owner (chapter 15). If the remainder has no owner, it also has no one watching its cost trajectory, and the seam will drift until someone asks the political question in the worst possible circumstances.

The operating rule underneath all of this is simple: every component of the bill has an owner. If nobody owns it, nobody can be asked about it — and the interstice is where the organization is least likely to ask. The seam is not a gap in the org chart; it is a line item. It belongs in the ownership record, on the bill, and in the next reorganization conversation — attached to a cost, with an owner, before the teams move.

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