Replying to LO28903 --
Harriett
I silently applauded your approach .. to find out just what happens when a
request is received for something simple, like the replacement bulb for a
projector.
I have tried the complex way ..everyone throwing their pennyworth into
very expensive data and information repositories, complex taxonomies etc.
And they cause a lot of problems .. not least with getting folk to use
infrequently new, complex systems.
In the end we took the most frequently used processes, based on a careful
measure of the demand by users, and did what you did. We tracked the
process from start to finish. This allowed us to understand for the first
time the complete process, to create an as-is map, to clean-up the process
so that it was "lean", and also mark on the map the information we needed,
where it was stored, who owned it .. and the usual version/date stuff.
And boy, don't things work better!
Roy Greenhalgh
HJRobles@aol.com wrote:
> Your e-mail hit home. I don't know that I have an answer but in my
> organization, a community college of 12,000 students and about 500
> fulltime employees, we struggle with the same problem. We are awash in
> data. We have a lot of information, more than we can get our hands
> around, and most of it not in any one place. And since we are a "people"
> business with more than 85% of our operating budget invested in faculty
> and staff, the amount of knowledge they individually and collectively
> possess is undoubtedly staggering. Our issue is the same as yours -- how
> to access what we need to know when we need to know it. How to draw on
> the collective knowledge and wisdom of several hundred professionals to
> move the college forward in its primary mission, to educate those 12,000
> students to achieve their 12,000 goals.
--Roy Greenhalgh <rgreenh@attglobal.net>
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