EVOLUTION OF BPR

Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco (cont’d)

Posted on the September 6th, 2008 under Change Management, Enterprise 2.0 by Gregory Yankelovich

The most interesting session of the second day for me was the Project Management one. A number of PM software 2.0 executives present, seemed to agree that the major shift in an approach is integration of project members into the project management process. In other words, we don’t need to chase our team members around to collect information about the status of their tasks, so we can report it to a project client or sponsor. We now have tools to do it! The tools discussed during the session seem to have a different approach, focus and even philosophy behind them, but I would love to take time and some poking around to form my own opinion where capabilities end and marketing starts.

Reflect on KM and Enterprise 2.0

Posted on the March 5th, 2008 under Change Management, Value of BPR by Gregory Yankelovich

I am new to blogging and, being involved with a few Enterprise software implementation projects during last few months (or years?), have missed a lot of discussions going in this space. Therefore I do not consider myself an expert on this subject, however I was involved with practical implications of sharing "tribal knowledge" within enterprise for quite a few years. In that context wiki/search and other "repository" type tools did not appear to add much value in my experience yet. Given enthusiasm of my many colleagues to experiment with these tools, I was wondering why so little practical results was achieved.

The latest attempt, I was a part of, involved using wiki as a project management methodology and Best Practices knowledge repository for the mid-size organization in Software Industry. The process of content development was very vigorous, democratic, cooperative and enthusiastic, the infrastructure was put in place and communications were issued to everyone in the company. The quality of the content was very impressive, but the knowledge did not find it’s way into the practice of the delivery of projects, did not improve at all quality of estimates or project management. Unfortunately this experience was consistent with the previous ones, and I can’t help, but think that the "passive" nature of wiki tools is the reason for failure.

People in everyday life don’t seem to use referential source of information until they are "stumped" and cannot proceed without specific piece of information. That leads me to believe that unless KM is contextually integrated into business process supporting/controlling systems, their value in an Enterprise environment is very limited.