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

Next to blaming people for process problems, making assumptions is a surefire way to miss the right solution. Which of these scenarios is more common in your organization?

(a) Options are debated based on what people think about a problem or issue and how they think it should be handled; or,

(b) Options are debated based on reliable data and information that illuminate the nature and causes of the problem or issue and point to possible solutions.

Most people act as if “a” is really “b”: My assumptions are based on experience and they’re as good as facts. They’re wrong. Guessing that you know what’s going on is not the same as actually knowing what’s going on, and the only way to know what’s going on is to collect and analyze relevant data and information. That’s where the second smart question comes in: How do we know that?

You have to be careful how you ask this question. If your boss says, “We’re getting customer complaints about how long they have to wait for service so we need to put more people on the phone lines,” you can’t just blurt out: “How do we know that?” It’s absolutely the right question to ask. Just don’t say it out loud quite yet.

If you work in an office where assumptions pass as facts, you have a terrific opportunity to differentiate yourself from the crowd and establish yourself as a thoughtful leader—no matter what position you hold. Start by looking for answers to the question: How do we know that? Pay attention to the problems and issues that your work group or department is facing. Keep track of what’s aggravating your boss. Pick one problem or issue that you can get information about, either because you do some work in that area or because you have coworkers who you can get you what you need.

Start with our first smart question: What’s the process? Consider the bigger picture: Who is affected by the problem or issue and what they require, who supplies what to the process, and where the process seems to be breaking down. Look for data related to the process such as:

• Service data (recent customer survey results, complaints, etc.)
• Quality data (errors, defects, warranty claims, etc.)
• Delivery data (on-time delivery, time taken for steps in the process, etc.)
• Cost data (cost per transaction, material costs, rework costs, etc.)

You may not have much or any of this data. Don’t despair. Organizations where decisions are frequently based on assumptions have shown that they do not place a high value on data, which is probably why their problems never seem to go away and new ones keep piling up and people spend big chunks of their days fighting fires.

You can be a leader in fire prevention. Figure out where the problem seems to be and identify how to measure service, quality, delivery, and cost performance in that area. If you can’t start collecting all of the data yourself, partner with coworkers who have access to other parts of the process. Describe what you need. Tell them you want to understand what’s going on to see if you can help solve a problem that’s been bothering your unit and irritating your boss. Plead ignorance, which is true since nobody has probably done what you’re trying to do.

You may not choose the best measures out of the gate. Not many people do, so don’t worry about it. If the data you’re collecting for a particular measure isn’t helping you better understand current performance, or if improving performance on the measure doesn’t really improve the process, try a different measure.

Once you’ve gathered data on your measures for a few months—you can’t begin to see a trend until you have at least three data points—you are ready to start bringing facts to your meetings. You may still feel uneasy asking the boss, “How do we know that?,” so answer your own question by presenting the data you’ve been collecting. You will find that people who sat silently while others voiced their opinions will quickly become engaged in debating the data because they’re challenging information, not their coworkers or managers.

And that will make you and your contribution even more valuable.

Tomorrow: Smart Question #3: Who are our customers and what do they require?

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 the City’s strategic plan are the basis for a performance agreement between the city manager and City Commission. The city manager negotiates performance agreements with each department, which, in turn, are incorporated into each staff member’s performance evaluation. In this way, the actions in the strategic plan and the measurement system are cascaded throughout the organization to all employees.

As the figure below shows, the City of Coral Springs’ uses performance data at all levels to align resources, support decision-making, and communicate results.

To read more about performance measurement, click on these articles:

• FREE REPORT: Baldrige Award-Winning Performance Measurement
• 10 Critical Questions: Data, Information & Knowledge
• How to Develop a Balanced Scorecard
• Aligning with Strategies & Measures
• Baldrige ROI

The report shows a diagram of the measurement system and the balanced scorecard used by the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center.

It presents the five-step measurement process used by Heartland Health and shows how it aligns its key measures.

The report includes the City of Coral Spring’s performance management system and talks about the performance agreements the city uses to align the strategic plan with its measurement system.

It lists the criteria MidwayUSA uses to select comparative data.

It describes the types of analysis that Cargill Corn Million performs and how its leadership team sets priorities for improvement.

It shows a diagram of the organizational performance reviews conducted by Premier.

It lists the criteria Iredell-Statesville Schools uses to select its key performance indicators and the process senior leaders use to review performance.

You can also learn about the common elements these award-winning organizations share and how you can use them to create an effective approach for your organization.

Sign up for your free report today and you will automatically receive free copies of the first two reports in this series on performance management and process management.

Sign up today!

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 the competition opened on July 13^th. You can “spin” the dots by clicking and dragging anywhere on the screen. The dots are color coded by type of idea: create power (orange), connect power (green), and use power (blue). The bigger a dot, the more votes it has received, and the bigger the halo around a dot, the more comments it has gotten.

For example, most of the biggest dots focus on creating power:

• Scott suggested solar roadways using recyclable solar panels that can be driven on. (2094 votes and 728 comments)
• Clarian Power offered plug-n-play solar power, a power module that plugs into an outlet to generate power instead of using it. (1476 votes and 90 comments)
• sbphelms’ idea is vertical-axis wind turbines on the roofs of tall urban buildings. (1301 votes and 184 comments)
• E.G.G. suggested an electric generator powered by garlic vegetables. (1189 votes and 99 comments)

The number of votes and comments suggests that GE’s infographic has done an excellent job of communicating information and encouraging interaction, and that’s an effective answer to the Baldrige question about how you make information available.

To read more about measurement, click on these articles:

• Data from a New Perspective
• Making Better Decisions, Faster
• How to Develop a Balanced Scorecard
• Communicating Performance on Key Measures

We make leaps of abstraction at work all the time. We assume we know what our customers require, what engages our employees, the source of a problem, and our marketplace and competitors. Because our assumptions may not, in truth, reflect reality, acting on them can cause all sorts of problems, and learning the truth through sound data and information can challenge our most dearly held beliefs.

This is what happened recently in Japan. Japan has a reputation for producing many of the world’s oldest people due, it has long claimed, to superior diet and a commitment to the elderly. It assumed it excelled in this area—until police found the body of one of the country’s centenarians, a man believed to be 111, who had been dead for more than thirty years.

The shocking discovery challenged a long-held belief, prompting officials to verify the status of the other centenarians in the country. According to an article in the New York Times by Martin Fackler, one of Tokyo’s oldest citizens at 113 had not been seen since the 1980s. City officials tried to visit a 125-year-old only to discover that her registered address had been turned into a city park in 1981.

To date, authorities have been unable to find 281 Japanese citizens listed as 100 or older. The search has made daily front-page news as Japanese try to understand the scope of the problem, whether the nation truly supports its most senior citizens, and what it means for the future of a rapidly-graying country.

Take a moment to challenge your beliefs about your organization. As Senge suggests, ask yourself “what you believe about the way the world works—the nature of business, people in general and specific individuals. Then ask: What is the data on which this generalization is based?”

Management by fact, a Baldrige core value, holds that plans, decisions, initiatives, policies, and actions will be more effective if they are based on reliable data and information than if they are based on assumptions.

Look for our newest report on performance measurement, coming soon, to learn how Baldrige Award winners manage by fact.

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 maps to depict accidents in their cities or states. Publishers could use them to show where books are being sold. The Department of Agriculture could use them to show where certain crops are coming from.

Not every organization would benefit from elevation maps. I can’t think of how a fast food restaurant would use them, for example, or a school. But the elevation maps are just a reminder anyway that showing data visually helps the viewer think differently about what is being shown. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives and new insights, consider artistically rendering your data.

To read more about data and information, click on these articles:

• Make Better Decisions, Faster
• How to Develop a Balanced Scorecard
• Communicating Performance on Key Measures
• Get the Information You Need
• 10 Critical Questions: Data, Information, and Knowledge