Baldrige Model: How do you manage information, knowledge and information technology?

Item 4.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you build and manage your knowledge assets. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.

Your organization needs processes for:

• Managing the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, and confidentiality of data, information, and knowledge
• Making needed data and information available to employees, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and customers
• Managing organizational knowledge
• Ensuring that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user-friendly
• Ensuring the continued availability of information systems during emergencies

Best practices to consider:

• The organization has identified what information its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners need to improve performance and has deployed processes that get the right information in the right hands at the right time.
• In a learning organization knowledge is currency, which is why a learning organization has processes for collecting and transferring knowledge and identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
• Critical data and information are backed up and stored offsite in case of an emergency, and the backup system is checked on a scheduled basis to ensure reliability.

Common problems areas:

• The right information either is not collected or is not distributed to the right people when it can be useful.
• Knowledge is lost when employees leave the company.
• No processes exist to identify the organization’s knowledge assets or to collect and use that knowledge.
• The organization does not pursue, value, or share best practices.

To read more about building and managing your knowledge assets, click on these articles:

• Get the Information You Need
• Knowledge Management 2.0
• Outside-the-Box Benchmarking

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A Baldrige Approach to Performance Measurement

Miami-Dade County, which is the focus of the free webinar being offered by ActiveStrategy (click on the banner on the right to find out more) integrated Baldrige through its participation in Florida’s state Baldrige program, the Florida Sterling Award. The City of Coral Springs, which won the Baldrige Award in 2007, also began its Baldrige journey with the Florida Sterling program and, like Miami-Dade County, it used ActiveStrategy software to automate its balanced scorecard.

You can see a diagram of the City’s performance measurement system at the end of this article. You can read more about the City’s system and the performance measurement systems of six other Baldrige Award winners in our free report, “How Baldrige Award Winners Measure Performance.” Just follow the arrow in the column on the right to sign up for this free report.

The City’s measurement system links all activity to the strategic plan and business plan, defines success in measurable terms, measures success, and uses data analysis to improve processes.

For example, the City noticed that its crime rate was creeping up slightly in 2006. It compared that trend to regional and national trends and found that, while its rate was lower than neighboring communities, the City’s upswing was not part of a general upward trend. Further analysis of its data showed that one particular type of crime, larceny, was the primary cause of the upswing. By focusing on larceny, the City uncovered and broke up an identity theft ring, which reversed its crime rate trend.

Key intended outcomes in…

Communicate Information Effectively

How do you make data and information available?

This question from the Baldrige Criteria assumes that you have good answers for the questions that precede it on selecting, collecting, aligning, integrating, and analyzing data and information, because if you don’t do these things well, there won’t be much of value to communicate. But if you have sound processes in place, the critical step in an effective performance measurement system is getting the right data and information in the right hands at the right time.

Very few organizations spend time on how they communicate key data and information. For most, it’s numbers on a chart. A few balanced scorecard followers use a stoplight approach alongside the numbers: green light means on target, yellow light means not quite, red light means trouble. A small percentage shows trend lines and benchmarks for their key measures to give users context for current performance. And that’s about it when it comes to communicating data and information, which is why it is always refreshing to discover a creative way to share information.

GE is awarding $200 million to ideas that help build the next generation power grid. It is accepting ideas in three categories: renewables; grid efficiency; and eco homes/eco buildings. You can read about the more than 1,800 ideas that have been submitted thus far—the Ecomagination Challenge ends September 30^th—by clicking here.

GE has taken an innovative approach to communicating this information. Each idea is a dot. The dots turn on an axis that begins with the first day…

Data from a New Perspective

We have all seen more than our shares of charts and tables. Data in columns and rows. If we’re lucky, a trend chart. Numbers filling pages filling handouts filling binders.

That’s why it is always delightful to find a new way of presenting information, as Doug McCune has done with crime in San Francisco. He took real data, aggregated it geographically, and artistically rendered it as elevation. More crime mean higher elevation. You have to see the maps to understand their impact. Click here to see the hills and mountains of San Francisco created by larceny, narcotics, assault, vandalism, warrants, prostitution, vehicle theft, and robbery.

As McCune points out, the features are pretty consistent across all of the maps. It looks like the northeast center of the city easily has the highest crime rate across all types of crimes. The most dramatic map is the prostitution map with its twin peaks casting shadows over the city.

It made me think of how an elevation map could be used to show an organization’s data. For example, if you measure quality at different points in a process, you could map the process and use the quality measures to create elevation along the route. If you work for a utility, you could use outage data to create elevation maps that showed where most outages occur in the area you serve. Sure, you already have the data and everybody knows that bigger numbers mean more outages, but visualizing those outages can have a powerful impact.

Governments could use elevation…