On the Same Sheet of Music - Reinforcing Knowledge Management
Where there is a sheet of music, there is the composer who created something unique. Because it was important, she took the time to save it. That sheet music exists because the initial spark of ingenuity was documented. Without the process of documentation, the creation cannot be shared with others. It won’t have a chance to provide a platform for more variations and orchestrations and lyrics and dance moves and opening nights at theaters and coffee house performances and college football half-time shows.
As a systems engineer, one of my responsibilities during business IT-projects was to identify requirements for work functions our project sponsors wanted to improve. I would facilitate sessions where I would question business personnel on their current processes, then capture these conversations using a modeling tool and a requirements document. These businesses also had a library of business documentation, and these documents were well-written, thoroughly reviewed and carefully implemented across the entire organization. However, everyone assumed it was too hard to use the existing documentation, so we got into the habit of generating new models of existing processes based on our facilitated conversations. If the same process was followed when producing a new symphony performance, it would be like finding each musician and vocalist that had a part in a previous symphony, interviewing them regarding their part, then trying to convey what they said so someone who was not the original composer could attempt to make the original symphony better!
Achieving organizational harmony is a great goal. It signifies that everyone knows what is going on, and actions and intentions have been communicated and coordinated. However the way we model processes to improve them mainly focuses on a singular system. Functions of the entire orchestra and production support crews as they work toward achieving documented strategic goals of the organization, must be considered. Without this holistic view, our IT project designs, as judged during end-user customers reviews, were often off-key, out of sync – some even canceled before project completion.
Any complex production effort involving hundreds of performers, technicians, volunteers and vendors always starts with just a few simple ideas. As organizations become more decentralized and complex, it may be difficult to remember why the original melody-line is relevant to everyone in the organization. For example, a cumbersome box-office process for securing tickets to the venue may color the way a music-loving customer perceives the entire production. Forgetting the simple, strategic purpose of your organization may disrupt the harmony of the total customer experience. The central sheet of music is no less important to the grand production than it was the first time that music saw the light of day, as captured in whatever form its creator used to document its essence.
Knowledge management (KM) can be music to the ears of your vibrant and growing organization. If corporate sheet music is arranged in the same natural rhythm common to the documentation originally crafted to describe how your business enterprise interacts, KM can be the tune your personnel can’t stop humming. Alternately, if the approach you are using to organize your KM is focused more on fragmented activities performed within individual departments, a solo artist may occupy the spotlight for a time but your orchestra as a whole may lose its ability to harmonize and keep the rhythm that resonates with your ultimate customers.
Reinforced Enterprise Business Architectures (REBAR) is a dramatically new approach for orchestrating business enterprise goals and objectives. REBAR is a collection of methods, tools and techniques that fortifies and ties together each self-reliant, functional department into one strong, interdependent, customer-focused experience. I developed REBAR to see if my simple idea for using existing documents as models would work. I used what I experienced during projects and challenged assumptions that I thought were wrong. As part of the research process, I found documented evidence that other researchers agreed with my observations - the whole enterprise cannot be characterized by detailed activity patterns of singular systems alone. This supported my reasoning regarding why those new models we kept building didn’t produce ROI. Some researchers I studied even described how the myopic focus on one system encourages stove-piped thinking. This explains why buying an IT solution to improve one system alone may disrupt your enterprise as a whole rather than improve it.
The REBAR approach to KM and strategic business improvement that I discovered involves analyzing the existing organizational document library to identify and describe themes central to business goals and objectives. Using a patent-pending process, that unique, creative library is transformed into an easy-to-access, cloud-based knowledge model. Those e-library documents, now fully tagged with metadata, capture the strategic mission and goals of the enterprise because they are crafted directly from the core business document written, authorized and implemented across the entire organization.
When I worked on complex projects in the past, I complained that the models produced by the software developers were too technical for our subject matter experts to understand and evaluate. I decided to experiment with allowing the patterns from tagged documents to emerge naturally from the data. This resulted in unique, yet simple visualizations that organizational managers, musicians, production crews and even software developers alike can interpret to achieve the shared view of a beautiful and harmonious performance. And adding related, updated and new documents to your core REBAR business repository structure ensures the original linked references persist, always keeping the original sheet music in view.
