All Posts Tagged With: "analysis"
Making Better Decisions, Faster
The Baldrige Criteria devote one Item to how you manage information, knowledge, and information technology. The goal is to make data and information accurate, reliable, timely, secure, confidential, and available to the people who need it, when they need it.
In “How Do You Speed Up Information Delivery?” (HBR, May 26, 2010), Tom Davenport addresses the need for speed in information delivery. He identifies several technical advances that are accelerating this including: (1) storing information in memory rather than on a hard drive for faster retrieval and manipulation; (2) using new forms of databases for faster data retrieval and analysis; and, (3) faster hardware and easier-to-use software the make data analysis easier.
This, he notes, “is the relatively easy part.” Process, behavior, and management change are tougher. The first step is to identify what information really needs to be delivered more quickly. Not all information is critical. Prioritizing will help focus resources on the greatest need.
Davenport points out that managers want information when they want it, which is not necessarily when they get it. For that reason, it’s often better to make information available for online access (pull) rather than issuing reports (push).
The next step is to have executives work with analysts “to identify what information is most needed quickly, and then to create alerts, query and reporting formats, and analyses that truly inform decisions.”
The final step, according to Davenport, is to make decisions faster. This is the…
1Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Data, Information & Knowledge
You manage what you measure, which is why, for decades, leaders managed their companies’ financial performance: They reviewed financial data regularly and other types of data sporadically if at all.
Category 4 in the Baldrige Criteria asks how you measure organizational performance, which for most organizations involves some type of balanced scorecard. It asks how you analyze and review performance and how that leads to performance improvement. And it asks how you manage your information, organizational knowledge, and information technology.
As we noted, the best way to evaluate your measurement system—and your management system—is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your measurement system, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- How do you select and collect the data and information you use to track (1) daily operations and (2) overall organizational performance, and how do you align and integrate these data?
- What are your key organizational performance measures?
- How do you select and use comparative data and information to provide benchmarks for these measures and to support decision making and innovation?
- How do you review organizational performance and capabilities, including competitive performance and progress on your strategic objectives and action plans?
- What analyses do you perform to support these reviews and to ensure…
Sophisticated Information Sharing
This is one of those “big picture” issues. If your organization is large enough to have business units, divisions, or multiple locations, you are big enough to have silos of data and information. In “Stop the Profit Drain: Pull Data Across an Entire Organization” (IndustryWeek, October 9, 2009), Michael Newkirk talks about a company that has 16,000 process improvement software licenses, which has the potential to create 16,000 silos. “It nourishes an environment where thousands of engineers reinvent the wheel because all the meetings in the world can’t share best practices efficiently enough to keep that from happening,” Newkirk writes.
Such silos are not limited to manufacturing or business. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you align and integrate data and information to track daily operations and overall performance. In other words, how do you move it out of the silos and into the hands of anyone, anywhere in the organization, who could use it to improve performance?
Newkirk cites a Korean steelmaker that used Six Sigma to make incremental process improvements but sought a larger impact. “There were still large profit variables between plants and items and scrap losses were unacceptably high,” Newkirk notes. “Traditional, isolated process oriented analysis wasn’t sufficient.”
The steelmaker pulled all of its data together across plants and processes. The result? Scrap ratio cut from 15% to 1.5%, a 50% reduction in lead times for standard hot coil production, and an inventory reduction of 60%.
Newkirk…
16Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
