Finale Blog for IS 456

This will likely be my last blog. I know we were not "required" to blog these, but wanted to look them over and thought that blogging made sense.

The readings that went into my "Convergance" post (previous) and final project are highlighted here. I am going to pick my favorite article from each of the remaining zip files and blog about it. There were many article in the last weeks, so I'm not even going to try to get them all.

The pace of topics covered for the last few weeks seems to have picked up, but the substance to the topics are shallower. Therefore, what a great balance to wrap things up!

Here we go....

Week 8 Article

Introduction to PMI’s Project Management’s Life Cycle – Egan

As an IT professional, I find the PMI life cycle very interesting. It really was meant to be a waterfall approach, but with agile and iterative cycles, the PM practice is changing. Less and less documentation is required ahead of time and spans of development are shorter. As a result, the practice is adapting.

I so a bit of project management work myself, but do not classify myself as a project manager. With the information gathered in this KM course, it is easy to see that the PM role can be increased or enhanced by making use of knowledge. The templates and best practices we discussed can be applied and used thought the project lifecycle. I believe that KM has a link to all areas of practice an PM is the governing role over project areas.

However, not all work is project work and does not require a PM. Therefore, I would definitely think that KM needs a champion outside the PM practice, but PM must make use of KM when managing a project.

Week 9 Article – Best Practices

Defining Best Practices APQC

This is a very short article, but drives home one point; there is not one best practice due to the fact that everyone is different. I would additionally charge that time and personal preferences have a big part in what best practices should be used. Best practices should be refined by the practitioners that use them.

Usually only one person (but not always) will author a best practice and this person may or may not have the “best” knowledge. I believe that best practices are validated and improved by others. Time will change some things and not others.

Week 9 - BPM

Three Examples of the Worst BPM Practices. – Olding

The first “worst practice” is that IT professionals may not have the expertise to lead a BPM initiative. I would definitely agree with this. Critical thinking and modeling is imperative to BPM. Understanding the business processes may or may not be understood by IT and the skills needed to improve are definitely not.

The second pitfall is underestimating the skills need from BPM. At my work, we have separate “BPI” groups that usually facilitate sessions. Sometimes out of the box thinking and industry knowledge can be very valuable.

Finally, the last point is not to blame end users. Again, I would agree with this. You need to not only understand the end user processes, but have to get buy-in from them and their managers. The job of BPM is to make processes better and BPM professionals are charged with evaluating and selling these ideas.

Week 9 – Organizational Development

The Mysterious Art of KM performance – Davenport

The famous 3 by 3 framework. I really enjoy and can relate to frameworks. Degree of segmentation versus degree of choice is an interesting paradox. The one-size-fits-all versus the one-size-fits-one is the age old struggle. Mandatory specialization versus mass personization. These are really market factors that many companies make and break on. I’m not sure how KM falls directly into these, but I can speculate that the more uniform a solution, the more explicit the knowledge can be and the more personalization that occurs will require more tacit knowledge.

Week 10 – KM and PM

SHARED KNOWLEDGE, “GLITCHES,” AND PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PERFORMANCE – Hoopes

What I got out of this article was the figure that showed how practices can translate into performance in the form of shared knowledge, cooperation, and coordination. The article states that these are “alternate” means, but I think it is varying degrees of “shared knowledge” to which this article want to focus. Nothing terribly outstanding to me here, but it is important to know that performance is impacted by the practices that are implemented and PM is primarily focused on process.

Week 10 – Management

KM Metrics Guide for DON KM – Navy

Interesting but difficult to follow article. I believe that as in figure 5, a balanced scorecard is implemented in may organizations. However, most companies do not pubize their scorecards as they are proprietary. This article is interesting as it shares the core focuses of the Navy. Measuring performance must be linked to an organization’s goals and vision. This article keeps it’s vision and strategy in the center. However, I believe that most organizations today are migrating away from this and looking at the customer as the center of metrics. “Customer Obsessed” organizations as I’ve seen want to measure what the end-user values.

Convergence

Convergence for me, as probably designed by the course, happened with the final project. We discussed in class the notion of nodes and relatoinships. Solutions can be formed with techology and organization changes. The final project template simpilies it to the following steps....

Overview (process of KM)
Problem ==> Root Cause ==> Solution ==> Rationale ==> Metrics

Appendices (supporting the "Overview")
Appendix A (Root Cause [Fishbone]) ==> Checklist for ID'ing (cause) ==> Solutions ( Technology => Organizational Components => Organizational Culture)

This really summarizes the course nicely and for my "problem," this helps to summarize and draw together the ideas of the course. As the Guinness Beer commercials phrases, "Genius !!!".

Without this project and ultimately the template, everything would not have tied together nicely (for me). Honestly, in the classes we discuss all these separately, but they all hit me in the "convergence" of the final document. Really any problem can be solved with the use of nodes and relationships. The root cause of any problem needs to be found before the solution can be sought. Templates and best practices will re-enforce this learning.

In my opinion, if there was one thing to take away from this class, it would be the notion of "notions and relationships" .

The second thing would be the difference between knowledge and information. One would think this should be self-evident, but when you really think about it, the difference it the reason for KM.