Acxiom rebuilds from scratch: at Acxiom Corporation, there are no fancy titles. Everyone's office is the same size, and nobody worries about going through the proper channels. The result? Phenomenal growth and a contented workforce

Workforce, Dec, 2002 by Patrick J. Kiger

Twelve years ago, Acxiom Corporation's chief executive, Charles Morgan, summoned his management team to a meeting to deal with a dire problem: people were asking him to make too many decisions. Early each morning, he complained, managers began lining up outside his door. As the day wore on, the line got longer and longer. Whether the matter was great or small, everyone wanted his input.

The problem was Acxiom's organizational structure. It was too top-driven, too rigidly hierarchical, like some old-fashioned factory or mill. It simply didn't work. The Little Rock, Arkansas-based company was a young, rising player in the cutting-edge field of "data mining"--amassing mountains of information such as phone numbers, addresses, and demographic data for client companies and sifting through it to identify potential new customers and serve existing ones. In order to stay ahead of its competitors, Acxiom had to be quick to capitalize on business opportunities. More important, it had to be flexible enough to meet its clients' highly specialized needs. If Morgan was involved in every decision, he told his managers and executives, the company would never be able to reach its potential. The organization had to find a new way to operate.

It was up to Acxiom's HR team to meet Morgan's challenge. Working closely with the chief executive, they devised a radical solution. Essentially, HR demolished the old corporate culture and built a new and startlingly different one to replace it. Instead of the old conventional corporate hierarchy, it adopted a streamlined, flattened organizational structure in which tides became relatively unimportant. The top-driven chain of command was replaced by a decentralized, results-oriented environment in which managers of individual business units now had considerable autonomy to make their own decisions--and to be responsive to customers. Finally, instead of being confined by the boxes on a flow chart, employees were assigned to work on teams that cut across conventional departmental lines to focus directly on major customer and business issues.

The Acxiom Business Culture, as the new organizational approach was called, proved to be a real shock to the system--in precisely the way that Morgan had hoped. Since the program's implementation in the early 1990s, the firm has been able to sustain tremendous growth. The company's revenues have grown from just over $100 million in 1993 to $870 million last year. The firm has become the dominant player in its field, building a client list that includes not only Fortune 500 behemoths Microsoft and General Motors, but also 23 of the 25 largest financial-services companies and six of the nation's top 10 insurers.

Although it did endure a revenue downturn in 2001 like many other information-technology companies, Acxiom's fortunes are again improving. In the most recent quarter, its earnings per share were up 75 percent over the same quarter in the previous year, from 8 cents to 14 cents. Revenues rose 9 percent, from $215.2 million to $235.4 million.

A major factor in the company's success has been a dramatic improvement in productivity that is due to the Acxiom Business Culture's elimination of wasted motion and decision-making logjams. Last year, for example, employees managed to deliver a massive Web-based prospect database for a client in 45 days--a third of the usual turnaround time for a project of that magnitude.

Acxiom's internal environment is as healthy as its bottom line. It has been named on three occasions to Fortune's list of the 100 best companies to work for in America, and twice has made a similar list of best information-technology workplaces compiled by Computerworld magazine. As a result, the organization has been able to achieve a voluntary turnover rate of 7.5 percent, lower than the information-technology industry's 10 percent average. The high degree of employee satisfaction is reflected in a recent survey, in which three-quarters of Acxiom's employees said they had the opportunity "to do what I do best every day" in their jobs. Eighty-five percent said their positions provided opportunities to learn and grow.

By boldly reinventing an entire organization, Acxiom's HR team enabled the company to achieve its potential to become an industry leader. For that, Acxiom wins the Workforce Optimas Award for vision.

Throwing out titles and tearing down inside walls

Acxiom's HR team started out by taking a hard look at the company's existing culture and questioning whether the basic premises were relevant to the new, rapidly evolving information marketplace. It didn't make much sense to organize workers into a hierarchy in which advancement was based on educational level, skills, or experience, because those credentials could become obsolete overnight. The distinctions by which individuals were ranked in an organization didn't have much relevance to the company's work. What really mattered was getting people to work together to create whatever products and perform whatever tasks the customers needed.