Tom Davenport on the Importance of Micro-decisions

March 19, 2009 at 10:40 am · Filed under FASTforward'09

My former colleague, Tom Davenport, is working on a new book on decision making. My friend Andrew Snider of Athenium recently spent some time with him to talk about the leverage that an organization can get by improving micro-decisions using systematic behavior measurement.  Tom reflected on this conversation as part of his blog post, Micro-decisions for Macro Impact.

Tom starts with the premise that “what many companies don’t realize is that micro-decisions - small decisions made many times by many workers at the customer interface - can have a major impact on the business.” I have seen this over and over again, both the “don’t realize” part and the major impact part. One insurance company in the early 90s laid off many of their supervisors to cut costs and effectively removed their company’s intelligence for making micro-decisions. The subsequently began losing over 600 million a year. Sound familiar?

One of the solutions for this firm was to build a knowledge management system to capture the wisdom of the few remaining supervisors and place in at the right points in the business process to affect micro-decisions. It was my introduction to knowledge management and this help lead to the company becoming profitable again. 

Tom adds in his post that until we “start to measure micro-decision makers at the individual level, we aren’t likely to improve their performance much. This is the approach of a company called Athenium, which applies it regularly to insurance, health care, and legal processes.” Athenium’s offers its teamthink web-based performance measurement solutions to address this issue. Their Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) measures the workforce behaviors that directly impact the alignment of operations with strategic goals and best practices.

Tom concludes with the idea that one of the simplest approaches to improving micro-decisions is to give those who make them a checklist to make sure they didn’t forget any key steps or issues. He mentions a recent New England Journal of Medicine article concluding that a 19-item checklist reduced deaths during surgeries by almost half. 

I can believe this also. In the mid 80s, I was involved in developing a checklist for loan officers of a major US bank that recently got a lot of bailout money. In this case they were losing tons of money on loans to South America. The solution was a checklist. It helped. I still have my copy. I should offer it on eBay or perhaps to bank so they could reuse the concept to help get out of the mess that they created.

Comments (1)

Enterprise 2.0 Tools Align with McKinsey Steps for Making Good Business Decisions

March 18, 2009 at 8:25 pm · Filed under FASTforward'09

A recent McKinsey survey on how companies make good decisions suggests several actions that are strongly associated with good financial and operational outcomes. In their survey, they asked executives on a global basis about a capital or human-resources decision their companies made. The results highlight the real business benefits such as increased profits and rapid implementation of several decision-making disciplines. It seems to me that in three of the four social media can play a useful role. Although in the end it is the people and what they might do with the technology, not the technology, that matter.

Here are the four approaches McKinsey mentioned and some comments on how enterprise 2.0 tools relate to each with links to AppGap reviews in most cases.

1. Ensuring that people with the right skills and experience are included in decision making – Social media can be very helpful in finding the right people with the right skills within a large organization, or even a small one. Tools like Connectbeam that help you find the right people can address this. I recently spoke with Johan Rosius from Novell Teaming, who shared with me a related example of a significant return on an enterprise 2.0 investment. The engineering group at Shell has a diverse set of skills and is scattered around the globe. When one of their plants goes down, it can very expense for each day it does not get back up and running.  Shell found that the key was getting people with the right prior experience to work on these down plants. 

So they created a community of practice with Novel Teaming. It has enabled Shell to better share best practices and to get the right resource applied to down plants. The result is hundreds of millions in cost savings. I can believe this as I was involved with a similar effort with global chemical company using older KM technology in the early 90s and similar results were achieved. However, now we have much better tools to address these issues.

2. Making decisions based on transparent criteria and a robust fact base - The necessary robust fact base can be augmented by the many eDiscovery tools (e.g., Attivio, Recommind MindServer, Exalead CloudView) that go beyond standard search criteria.  For example, the new iQuest tool, Blue Ant, has helped some pharma companies find missing data in their terabytes of content located in different tools with different metadata. In the past it was easier to rebuild a compound that find an existing one.

3. Ensuring that the person who will be responsible for implementing a decision is involved in making that decision - This is critical and the one of the four that social media will not play a direct role. However, the many enterprise 2.0 platforms for managing efforts (e.g., Traction, Central Desktop, QuickBase,  Wrike) can certainly help the person and team implement the decisions.

4. Some types of consensus-building and alliances apparently can help create good outcomes - Social media tools can be very helpful in building consensus and support alliances through enhanced collaboration.  The list is long here (e.g. Awareness, Tomoye, Lotus Connections).

I think the capabilities supported by most enterprise 2.0 tools are aligned with the basic principles of good decision making. This is one reason for their adoption. See another McKinsey report for the related report on six ways to make Web 2.0 work

Comments (2)

Social Networking Collides with the Justice System

March 18, 2009 at 5:46 pm · Filed under FASTforward'09

Since my last post on the Tweeting juror, there’s suddenly been a lot of media attention on the advent of social networking among jurors in legal proceedings.

I was going make a reference to all this as opening a “Pandora’s Box,” but the common definition of Pandora’s Box was the unleashing of evil forces upon the world. Social networking isn’t an evil force, but it does seem to be starting to wreak havoc on jury trials. Jurors are supposed to remain mum on the proceedings while they are underway, and not seek out alternative sources of information. But technology the intruder is intruding.

Hylton Joliffe, our esteemed colleague and the creative force behind this blogsite, forwarded to me a new article in The New York Times that talks about this latest threat to jury impartiality. When the Gray Lady gets worked up, you know this is a big deal.

A case in Florida was declared a mistrial because not one, but all nine jurors admitted to looking up the case on the Internet.

In my own backyard, the article notes, “defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded before the verdict that the judge declare a mistrial because a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook.” According to the Times article, “The juror had even told his readers that a ‘big announcement’ was coming on Monday. But the judge decided to let the deliberations continue, and the jury found Mr. Fumo guilty. His lawyers plan to use the Internet postings as grounds for appeal.”

Of course, the legal system has been battling the intrusion of communications technologies for decades now. Television cameras were  only admitted into courtrooms starting in the 1990s. Judge Lance Ito may now be wishing they had held off for another decade.

And, apparently, the legal and judicial system still haven’t gotten their arms around social networking.

Social networking is a great thing for connectivity, for business, and for professional development. But apparently there is a place that will remain off limits.

Comments (1)

How do you bring the citizen voice into conventional media? Giving Social Media Meaning

March 18, 2009 at 12:48 pm · Filed under FASTforward'09, KETC

At KETC, the public TV station in St Louis, we like all other media outlets have been struggling to find out how to bring the voice of the “citizen” into what we do. We need to find out how to use the huge potential of our citizens to deepen and make more meaningful our attempts to help St Louisans help each other cope with the financial crisis.

Our starting point is with the young. They are the digital natives and it is their future that is most at risk and they are the people least likely to watch Public TV. We lose them at 8 and they tend not to return until they are 50 plus!

The young are our great under-served group and so make our best target for trying to make a positive change.

Of course most young people are very experienced users of social media. Much more experienced that most of the folks at KETC. BUT what we know how to do very well is to

• Tell a story
• Edit video and sound
• Have a big megaphone – we have the official “air”

So we have been trying a few experiments with the Flip Camera – we have lent some Flips to groups of younger folks and given them an assignment – We asked them to comment on what was The American Dream today for them. You will see that this has become a very difficult question to answer now. What dream? Seems to be a common point of view.

We then worked with them to turn their material into the best 3 minute epics that is possible and then put them onto our “Air” – we have put the rest onto our YouTube Channel.

It’s early days. But our hope is that this might be the beginning of a “social media school” where we build a cadre of young people who can take their existing skills in social media and become better story tellers, expert editors and have a growing reputation in our community. Equipping them to make a difference.

Here is the launch program that will show you how we are going about this.

Here is the YouTube STL American Dream Channel

Watch this space as we expand our project to help people find help in the Mortgage and the Financial Crisis.

Comments

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One

March 16, 2009 at 4:56 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing

I write about Enterprise 2.0 for several blogs, including this one,  but I am an enterprise of one so many of the tools do not apply to me. However, there are many that do seem useful. So I decided to look at the possibilities in a more systematic way. Last week I posted a five part series on my own blog, Portals and KM, which provided the results. I am not going to repeat the series here but wanted to share this summary and links to the series at the end of this post if anyone is interested.

First, I followed my own advice and mapped out my business workflow. Then I looked at the tools I currently use for each major step before thinking about any further moves into the enterprise 2.0 space.

Since I write for multiple blogs and provide blog consulting services to businesses, my work flow in very content heavy. I decided the three main sections are one: content monitoring, two: content collecting, assembling, and creation, and three: content publishing and archiving. Step two then reaches into both step one and step three for new content.

At the suggestion of my friend, Kate Pugh, I enlisted the help of Gil Yehuda, former analyst at Forrester Research. He wrote the excellent report, Forrester TechRadar¬ For I&KM Pros: Enterprise Web 2.0 For Collaboration, that I reviewed, see – Forrester on Enterprise 2.0 for KM Professionals. Gil was generous to provide some excellent advice, as well as a sounding board for my initial ideas. The most complex step is the second one that was where we had most of our discussion. Gil also altered me to some excellent free tools for the first step. Tomorrow I start there.

I hope this series is useful to all the other one-person enterprises, as well as those in larger firms who still need to manage their own content. I welcome additions and approaches that you have found useful.

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Two – Content Monitoring

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Three – Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Current Approach

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Four – Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Potential New Approaches

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Five – Content Publishing and Archiving

Comments (2)