All Posts Tagged With: "knowledge management"
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 whole reason to speed up information delivery in the first place: To make better, more…
1Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhich Side of the Digital Divide Is Your Organization On?
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you communicate within and outside your organization and how you collect and transfer knowledge. The best answers to those questions are moving in a digital direction.
Here’s a quick quiz to determine if your organization is “switched off” for digital or “switched on,” courtesy of Jeffrey F. Rayport (“Does Your Company Need a Digital Readiness Checklist?” Harvard Business Review, February 9, 2010).
- We use a “walled garden” client like Lotus Notes for email, calendar, and contacts vs. we use an “open platform” like Outlook that facilitates easy connectivity.
- Our technology staff behaves as if we work for IT vs. our technology staff knows it works for us by enabling our productivity and output.
- Our organization’s policies block external streaming media, social networking, and some commercial sites to PCs and apps downloads to mobile devices vs. our policies embrace external media streams in all formats and from all sources.
- Our day-to-day communications rely on extended voicemail and lengthy face-to-face meetings vs. our daily communications rely on email, IM, phone, and concise face-to-face meetings.
- Internal communications are infrequent and randomly issued and take the form of “official” memos vs. frequent and regularly issued internal communications in the form of email employing rich media.
- Our intranet lacks or has limited social media features and crowd-sourcing of ideas vs. our intranet is abundant with social media features to encourage collaboration and crowd-sourcing.
- Our knowledge management system is hierarchical, top-down, and run by KM “professionals” vs. our knowledge management system is non-hierarchical, bottom-up, and managed by a lean staff.
- Our organizational meetings take place in broadcast…
Harvard Business Review’s Most Influential Management Ideas of the Decade
Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.
3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.
4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.
5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.
6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.
7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.
8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.
9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others and you would be smart to develop them.
10. Competing on Analytics. The data you collect…
4Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedKnowledge Management 2.0
The Baldrige Criteria ask four questions specifically about how you manage knowledge in your organization:
- How do you collect and transfer it internally?
- How do you transfer it from and to customers, suppliers, partners, and collaborators?
- How do you identify, share, and implement best practices?
- How do you assemble and transfer knowledge for use in your strategic planning process?
In his book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), Andrew McAfee describes how organizations use emergent social software platforms to capture and share knowledge, identify and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.
These platforms include wikis, Twitter, Facebook, and other software tools. In an interview (you can listen to it here), McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business, talks about how these tools fuel a shift in “aerating your work.” One example he uses is the U.S. intelligence community, which saw its inability to manage knowledge exposed on 9/11. Since then, the intelligence community has deployed new 2.0 tools including launching an internal Wikipedia, encouraging blogging within strict guidelines, and developing a search function to improve access to shared information.
McAfee sees two hurdles most organizations must overcome to take advantage of these new tools. First, leaders are not aware of how the tools work and how the new tools can improve internal knowledge management. Second, they’re afraid that using the tools will make it impossible to control confidential information.
McAfee tested that concern by asking a lot of organizations that are…
7Dec2009 | 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 that the conclusions of these reviews are valid?
- How do you translate the findings from these…
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 identifies five capabilities you need to align and integrate your data, information, and knowledge across…
16Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Popular Improvement Tools
The list comes from the Global Benchmarking Network’s 2008 survey on business improvement and benchmarking. Which of these does your organization use?
- Mission and vision statement
- Customer/client surveys
- SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
- Informal benchmarking (encouraging employees to learn from other organizations)
- Quality management system (think ISO)
- Improvement teams
- Employee suggestion scheme
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
- Performance benchmarking (comparing process/activity performance levels)
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering
- Balanced scorecard
- TQM (total quality management)
- Business excellence (using Baldrige, EFQM, or other national excellence models)
- Best practice benchmarking (structured process for comparing performance and implementing best practices)
- Corporate social responsibility system
- Lean
- Industrial housekeeping (5S)
- Quality function deployment (QFD)
- Six Sigma
More than 450 responses from 44 countries ranked their organizations’ usage of these improvement tools in the order above. The percent of usage ranged from 77% for “mission and vision statement” to 22% for Six Sigma. Every tool from the top through PDCA was used by more than half the respondents; the rest were used by fewer than half.
The Baldrige message is a good news/bad news deal: “Business excellence” is currently being used by just 40% of the respondents, which is pretty good considering that only 59% said they understood what the “business excellence” tool is.
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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