Carol RozwellIt was delightful to spend time with clients over the past few days at the BPM Summit. The conversations ranged from how to increase collaboration to best practices for process improvement to how social networking can add value to the business. What impressed me about all the people I spoke with was their willingness to share their experiences and learn from their peers.
One of the undercurrents of many conversations and 1-1 meetings was the concern over the potential loss of valuable process knowledge in the near future as companies respond to the economic difficulties by downsizing the workforce. Many people were searching for ways to capture this process knowledge without resorting to the heavy-handed techniques that were used in earlier eras of KM.
So it seems like this is the perfect time to explore the organizational fabric of firms and examine how work gets done using social network analysis. Perhaps that’s why my session on getting value from social networks was well attended even though it was in the second to last slot of the event. We’ve used BI to extract insight from data; the time has come to use BI to extract insight from social networks.
Category: Collaboration Tags: BPM, Collaboration, Social network analysis, Social networks
2 responses so far ↓
1 Garth Knudson August 10, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Carol, cool insight. In fact we wrote a whitepaper about the Intellectural Captial Crisis underway in the US Federal Govt.
Check out http://www.handysoft.com/downloads/view/289.
The Intellectual Capital Crisis of Govt
The Federal Government is facing an impending crisis from “brain
drain.” The culprit: retirement. According to the Office of Personnel
Management (OPM), the Executive Branch is particularly at risk.
Fact:
• 40% of all Federal Branch personnel are over 50 years old
• 4% of all Federal Branch personnel will retire each year until 2010
• 20% of IRS employees are retirement-eligible in 2007, 40% in 2011
• 50% of SSA civil servants are retirement-eligible in 2010
• 33% of USDA civil servants can retire today
Government organizations in general will have had a difficult time managing their intellectual capital. In light of these dynamics, to effectively train and equip future leaders, organizations must address capturing and distributing employees’ intrinsic knowledge and experiences…………………..
2 Carol Rozwell August 11, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Very interesting statistics. I wonder how many organizations are aware of how large the potential loss of IC will be in the coming years?
So what to do? Certainly the place to start is to get an accurate scoping of the problem. One example of how a company went about capturing insight is provided in this research note:
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=850916&ref=g_forward&call=email
What other suggestions do people have?
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