Last week I attended Day 2 of Internet Librarian International 2010 (#ILI2010), to hear the latest on the use of social media in libraries. The title of this blog is inspired by Dr Hazel Hall’s1 keynote presentation where she talked, amongst other things, about the need to help Library and Information Services users to evolve …
Guest blog by Matthew Loxton1 This discussion is about Process Improvement from a Knowledge Management perspective, but rather than covering the topic from the stratosphere, I have chosen to dig into a very specific and somewhat narrow slice – the use of internal crowdsourcing and tagging as a conduit to producing (and encouraging) process and …
Employee involvement is of course fundamental to the success of any business process improvement initiative: without the close involvement of those who are involved in an organisation’s process, it would be futile to try to identify opportunities for improvement, let alone to try to implement them. So it was with some interest that I read …
Communities of practice and social networks Practitioners of knowledge management, sociologists, and many other business and academic professionals recognize the importance of ‘communities of practice’ or ‘communities of interest’ and social networks both within and across organisations for general human interaction, problem resolution, creativity and innovation, and personal or professional development. Techniques such as ‘social …
Social media: putting you and your business at the heart of your community Read More »
I’ve been on the look out for a good book on how to help teams develop their key messages for introducing change. Whilst ‘Perfect Phrases for Communicating Change’ by Lawrence Polsky and Antoine Gershel1, does indeed have a rich array of phrases to use in different situations, it still did not quite help me with …
Communicating change – some practical procedural guidance Read More »
An integrated approach to Strategy, People, Process, Content and Technology is central to the success of business process improvement. Elisabeth Goodman, Owner and Principal Consultant, RiverRhee Consulting, opened the conference with the importance of these themes in achieving Business Process Excellence (BPE). She also came back to them in a later presentation (http://slidesha.re/aVhZso) describing the role …
Readers of my blogs will know that I am an avid reader. I’ve just made my way through ‘Do more great work’ by Michael Bungay Stanier. It’s a misleadingly small book! It looks small, and from the outside could be mistaken as the kind of book that you can wiz through. But it’s taken me …
Building strong personal career paths – do you have a case study to share? Read More »
Knowledge management and creativity/ innovation enhance project management. I am a firm believer in the value of knowledge management to enhance project management. I also believe that the use of formal structures, such as those advocated in Lean and Six Sigma (or process improvement), and project management, give people more rather than less scope for …
‘Topgrading’ by Bradford D Smart1, is a wonderful testament to the existence of talented individuals who can also ‘work smarter’, ‘deliver higher quality work’, ‘demonstrate greater team work’, and ‘find ways to get the job done in less time and with less cost’. Smart argues that it’s the proportion of ‘A’ players in an organisation …
“Topgrading”: it’s possible to be talented AND be an effective team player Read More »
As Stephen R. Covey, Bob Whitman and Breck England point out, in their one-hundred-and-ten page “Predictable results in unpredictable times”1: “in bad times, the distractions are more severe than ever… As people get laid off, the survivors have more to do. The distractions pile up to the sky as the economy grows rougher…” In our …
