"It's often the employees--rather than outside consultants--who know a company's products and processes best. According to management experts, many of the most innovative companies tend to solicit ideas from staff throughout the organization, not just the executive ranks."
-Rachel Emma Silverman, "For Bright Ideas, Ask the Staff", The Wall Street Jorunal, October 17, 2011.
Life can be intense. Every day, employee dramas enter the workplace unsolicited. Some of the greatest workplace concerns we face as HR professionals, employees, and caring colleagues are making sure:
Intentional wrongdoing, inadvertent employee mishandling, shoddy record keeping, or a manager or worker with a hidden agenda can devastate company finances, reputation, and employee morale. Noncompliance penalties, unemployment insurance, time-consuming training programs, lower productivity, and other HR costs can pull strongly on the bottom line as a result. So what can you do to:
… help staff members comply with corporate policies?
… improve confidence, trust, and satisfaction with your HR department and company?
… discourage workers from wrongdoing and prevent acts of poor judgment?
… protect your organization and its workers from engaging in and getting away with---or experiencing---harassment, unjust treatment, false accusations of such activity, or other harm?
… guard your organization against false accusations?
The answer lies in timely, complete, accurate documentation…along with the ability to organize, associate, and handle information appropriately, consistently, and quickly when you need it. The challenge: gathering it from diverse places including your HR software, document repositories, payroll systems, email, voice messages, and more, and maximizing its use everywhere it has value.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato viewed everything as a form, and every form as an ideal version of an object. His notions hold true with an increasingly popular business tool: electronic forms (eforms), which allow organizations to stipulate the ideal form for content so it enters their organizations as consistent, desirable, and ready to use. (Had Plato lived to see eforms, I think he would have approved.)
To generate desired efficiencies, electronic forms demand meticulous attention to detail. Each form must shape the content it captures to maximize meaning and usefulness for those who rely on it. When they’re well designed, forms gather quality content and use it intelligently. Built-in controls provide tools to capture and make meaningful information useful wherever it has value. This article will help you understand considerations in designing and using online forms so they will supply the control, compliance, and results you’re looking for.
I often think both IT and managers don't reevaluate their business processes enough. The TechRepublic has a great article in reminding us that this economy presents a great opportunity to implement 10 best practices for business process measurement.
Lean times often present opportunities for analyzing, fine-tuning, and improving business processes. In fact, the economic survival of some organizations may depend on such improvements. Here are some pointers to help you build a successful process measurement program.
I particulary like #9: Don't forget about IT metrics.
You know you're getting old when...
...younger people discover the benefits of paper.
The printed pages were better then just looking at the digital versions, since we could code on our laptops while looking at the printouts, compare different pages, sit around pages and discuss and have all this goodness at our fingertips.
My respects to Drupal developer Gábor Hojtsy for his good reminder on the benefits of non-technology in the things that we do. I'm hoping this post leads to some Friday fun here in the comments and also on Twitter.
You know you're getting old when...
Intranet Benchmarking Forum: "How to develop governance around social media – mitigating the risks and fostering user trust – was the subject of a recent briefing paper for IBF members, written by our director of intranet strategy & governance, John Baptista.
Silicon.com: "This will be quite a turnaround. How many companies do you know that are supposedly involved in high-tech services yet ban their employees from using social networks, podcasts or blogs? How do they think people share information these days?
I still remember the days before email, when a memo would go around with a stapled distribution list. This is the distant past now for anyone under 30. If people organise their own life around networks of contacts then isn't it obvious that companies will have to?"
John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise. I not only liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.
These web sites will set further expectations on the internal systems you use and a requirement to integrate internal information with these external sources of information. Web 2.0 has an answer for this as well with an integration technique known as "mash up", the ability mix information from multiple sources using the web browser itself as the point of integration. These external sources of information also provide something that our internal information systems could never provide, a critical mass of opinion utilizing the Wisdom of the Crowds. We will ultimately need to combine external opinion with our internal opinion to get more accurate predictive decision making with our own unique insights inside the enterprise.
When I read what John has written, I can't help but think of our previous discussions on the strength of weak ties. Companies that are willing to seek out knowledge internally and externally of their control boundaries are likely to have a greater business advantage over those companies that prevent their workers from taking the discussion beyond the office walls. What a boring life that would be to only be able to talk to colleagues that wear only the same company logo you are wearing? Companies need to accept the changes that are about to take place as their youngest workers will likely want and need to collaborate with more than just their fellow employees. The world via social publishing offers their workers more than what most single companies can provide alone.
Intelligent Enterprise: A new Ventana Research report finds that most companies are falling short on the basics of performance management. Here are five sets of diagnostic questions as well as best practices for broader, more responsive and more effective planning and budgeting.
A couple days ago my jaw dropped when I read CMS Watch's article, "Do you need an ECMS, WCMS, or Portal?". Last week, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive and Gadgetopia had mentioned how he was uncomfortable seeing enterprise content management systems and Web content management systems lumped together in the same comparison article. I responded to him that the boundaries between the two information systems do seem to get blurrier and blurrier all the time. In the CMS Watch article, Tony Byrne writes, "Sometimes it's hard to know. The lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry."
It would seem to me that as we continue on this Web 2.0 journey where content is being mashed together...the management systems themselves are going through their own sort of mash-up. However, Tony Byrne's article emphasizes that indeed while these management systems can overlap one another there are still distinctions between the two. If you're more interested in publishing a WCMS will fit you just fine, but if you're needing to focus more on business process then an ECMS must be looked at.
Why don’t IT people get more respect? On this Labor Day, things are actually looking better for people who work in corporate IT. Budgets aren’t quite so tight. Companies are hiring. Interesting IT projects are getting a green light. But when it comes to how our fellow employees think about us, IT work is a train wreck. Users break the rules we set up, ignore the processes we develop and generally act as if we’re clueless in what we do.On a different subject, Bruce A. Steward has written an article to remind us that supporting our customers is more than just improving the business process.
Businesses and organizations that have large amounts of information to provide to users need a method for guiding that information from creation through editing, approval, publishing and maintenance to archiving. This process is generally referred to as content management. While the concept of content management has been around for a long time—newspapers have been using it for decades—it’s a relatively new term for most people.This article is a must read not only if your business or organization is involved with content management, but also if you are the guy or gal that will be working, developing, or implementing the CMS. I believe one of the problems us software folks have is that we often define a CMS by the software alone. This is a good reminder that a CMS not only includes information technology but also involves organizational goals, strategic planning, project management, and most importantly of all...the people in the organization involved with content management.
" The rise of good-enough technology raises different questions for do-it-yourselfers and major corporations alike. It's no longer whether we can afford a technology, but more often whether we can afford the disruption if and when it fails. Is it critical? Do we have backup in place?"
"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes. Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."
-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.
Enterprise architecture essentials, Part 1: What's best for your organization? - Every organization has unique business needs, so a variety of factors are important when planning an enterprise architecture approach for your company. In this article, examine elements you should take into consideration when planning a new or revised enterprise architecture.
