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

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 informed, and faster decisions. He suggests measuring and managing the cycle time of key decisions.

To read more about information management, click on these articles:

• Communicating Performance on Key Measures
• Which Side of the Digital Divide Is Your Organization On?
• Get the Information You Need
• 10 Critical Questions: Data, Information & Knowledge
• Sophisticated Information Sharing

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 mode as “one-to-many” communications vs. meetings that take place in dialogue mode as “many-to-many” communications.
• Our culture encourages information hoarding vs. our culture encourages information sharing.
• Our organizational politics are not transparent and are predicated on information asymmetries vs. our politics are relentlessly transparent and predicated on information symmetries.

If your organization fits the first half of more than a few of these contrasting statements, it is “switched off” for digital. The statements represent the Digital Divide and they shape how you answer key questions Rayport poses: “What impact has digital had on what you offer your customers or clients, how you interact with them, and, perhaps most critically, how you lead and manage yourselves?”

You can choose whether your organization is “switched on” or “switched off” for digital, as long as you recognize that those that are “switched on” will rule your industry—if they don’t already.

To read more about more effective communication and information management, click on these articles:

• Knowledge Management 2.0
• The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise
• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Effective Employee Communication
• Baldrige for the 20-Teens

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 can be turned into intelligence.

11. Reverse Innovation. I don’t know where the clever name came from, but what HBR is focusing on is the emergence of huge markets in India and China.

12. Sustainability. By which, HBR means going green, and it declares that 2010-2020 will be the decade of sustainability.

From a Baldrige perspective, listening to customers, managing risk, promoting innovation (creativity), focusing on strategies and governance, developing managers, converting data into knowledge and knowledge management, and pursuing sustainability would rank as influential management ideas because they key components of a systematic approach to performance excellence.

As for improving HBR’s list, I would suggest the past decade also saw the proliferation of Lean and Six Sigma as process improvement methodologies, the emphasis on agility to respond more quickly to a rapidly changing environment, and widespread acceptance of the balanced scorecard as a way to measure performance.

Here’s hoping the list ten years from now touts the Baldrige model as one of the decade’s most influential management ideas.

To find out more about these topics, read:

• 9 Ways to Get Closer to Customers
• Anticipating Disruptive Change
• Making Innovation Part of Your Culture
• Transforming Measurement
• Get the Information You Need
• Knowledge Management 2.0
• 10 Steps to World-Class

• 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 using the tools to share their bad experiences. He didn’t hear any. “When you let people narrate their work and ask and answer questions freely, people do it in almost exclusively competent and healthy ways,” McAfee said. “There are almost no Enterprise 2.0 horror stories of people violating confidentiality”—or of posting inappropriate content, harassing coworkers, or griping about the organization.

Baldrige organizations have taught us that organizations that operate as a system, aligned in support of their missions and visions, outperform their competitors. The emergent social software platforms support this by helping organizations identify, capture, and transfer knowledge and information from across the organization.

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:

1. 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?
2. What are your key organizational performance measures?
3. How do you select and use comparative data and information to provide benchmarks for these measures and to support decision making and innovation?
4. How do you review organizational performance and capabilities, including competitive performance and progress on your strategic objectives and action plans?
5. What analyses do you perform to support these reviews and to ensure that the conclusions of these reviews are valid?
6. How do you translate the findings from these reviews into priorities for continuous and breakthrough improvement and into opportunities for innovation, and how do you deploy these priorities throughout your organization?
7. How do you ensure the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, confidentiality, availability, and accessibility of your organizational data, information, and knowledge?
8. How do you manage organizational knowledge to collect and transfer workforce knowledge, transfer knowledge to and from stakeholders, assemble and transfer relevant knowledge to your strategic planning process, and rapidly identify, share, and implement best practices.
9. How do you ensure that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user friendly?
10. How do you ensure the continued availability of hardware and software systems and the continued availability of data and information in an emergency?

To read the world-class responses of Baldrige Award recipients to these questions, click here and then click on the award application summary you wish to review. Go to Category 4, Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management, to learn about its measurement system.

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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 the organization:

• An up-to-the-minute, unified view of all relevant data. You need to integrate data, information, and knowledge to produce “one version of the truth.”
• A rigorous framework for historical analysis. You need processes for “testing and managing models and encoding business rules and criteria for analysis.”
• Tools for proactive analysis and action. Predictive analysis using in-process measures helps you catch errors and defects during the process rather than waiting to react at the end.
• A living archive of collective knowledge. You need processes for collecting and transferring workforce knowledge and for rapidly identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
• Knowledge available to all stakeholders. Data, analysis, and knowledge need to be transferred within the workforce and to leaders, customers, suppliers, partners, and collaborators.

You can see these capabilities in action in the application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients. For example, the application by Cargill Corn Milling (CCM), which won the Award in 2008, states that “the Mill-Feed Product Development Group team works with Cargill Sweeteners Europe to collect, transfer, and share best practices for mill and feed operations for 31 worldwide mills.” CCM also shares best practices through its Centers of Expertise, which “are formal internal groups focused on specific process areas and charged with the responsibility of transferring knowledge for use within CCM.”

If you are large enough to have created silos of data, information, and knowledge, you are large enough to need formal, systematic processes to break them down, making it easy for those who can benefit from the data, information, and knowledge to get it.

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