knowquestion :: Stephen Bounds

(Reposted from LinkedIn, where an interesting discussion of Enterprise Architecture's role in the modern organisation is taking place.)

SaaS is an interesting beast. If we consider "work" to exist on a continuum from servitude on the left (a completely custom service on demand) to shop window on the right (here's what on display; take it or leave it), SaaS is far more to the right.

Joan Williams recently wrote an important piece in HBR about the fact that men, and particularly younger men, are increasingly rejecting career paths that require an overcommitment of time to work. Faced with the option of "up or out", men are choosing "out":

Younger men increasingly want schedules that work around family needs — just as women have been demanding for years ...

There was an important and insightful post from JP Rangaswami last week. JP is far ahead of me in incorporating the work of the recently-deceased Ronald Coase into his worldview (but I'm trying to catch up), and he absolutely nails why resilience and preparedness for change is increasingly essential to organisational survival:

One of the commonly-held beliefs of managers is that productivity improvements can be best done through the development and implementation of new or upgraded ICT systems. The McKell Productivity Report (2012) writes:

It's not too late to get a discounted Early Bird registration for the knowquestion workshops.

Email has been (and remains) the biggest thorn in the side of recordkeepers in modern organisations. For most people it consists of a mish-mash of routine work correspondence, significant collaboration efforts, records of critical decisions and sometimes even legally binding agreements – along with funny JPGs, invitations to lunch, and records of deeply personal non-work events.

This makes a email a serious and ongoing risk for organisations, potentially vital but also risky to access after staff members leave due to privacy concerns

[Read on to find out about a possible solution]

In a little over three months' time, the final mandatory Check-up submission will be sent by departments and agencies to the National Archives of Australia for collation and reporting to the Minister.

These Check-up surveys benchmark agencies against the minimum recordkeeping requirements they must achieve by 2015 to be compliant with the Digital Transition Policy. This digital transition requires a majority of records in agencies to be handled electronically, with a minimum of new paper records created.

The surveys are worthy, but flawed.

[Read on to find out about the problems]

In a capital city near you, in the near distant future ...

Pierre, Frieda and Walter are in AcmeCo's meeting room for an important contractual discussion. The red light of a CCTV blinks unobtrusively in the corner of the room, capturing every word and actions in 1080p HD video, with secondary lenses running OCR transcripts of every piece of text on every document displayed in the room. Walter, from BondCo, is wearing his Google Glass Neo fashion range, blue record light serenely notifying that he is streaming the conversation back to BondCo's cloud-based record bank.

The conversation is friendly, but occasionally a watcher from the present would be jarred by an odd turn of phrase. These special phrases are those which legal precedent has deemed to demonstrate that obligations of good faith are incurred or avoided.

Similar scenes are taking place in coffee shops and pubs all across the city between colleagues, friends, and family. For the most part, small talk becomes more measured; people know that anything might be recorded and reflected back on them at some point in the future. Others see the constantly recorded environment making pretence pointless, and embrace complete authenticity – as if daring people to ridicule their human foibles.

[Welcome to the always-on recordkeeping world.]

During May a.k.a Information Awareness Month 2013, I hope you enjoy this series of reflections on the current state of Information Management

As anyone who has ever had to deal with a government department or large corporation knows, a large proportion of requests need to be initiated by filling out a form. These can be paper, paper-analogue (ie PDF) or online forms.

The logic of having forms seems impeccable: By making it clear what the organisation needs to know upfront to complete the request, the need for back-and-forth correspondence can be eliminated, leading to more efficient service.

However forms have an unfortunate side-effect. The time taken by people to fill out and submit information is "free" from the perspective of the organisation receiving the forms. Therefore, there is a strong incentive to push as much effort as possible on to the submitter.

[Read on to see how forms create inefficiency]

Pinched with gratitude from Bob Lewis and stored here for future reference:

[To improve] organizational effectiveness, [rank these six dimensions] in order of importance for each business function targeted for attention:

• Fixed cost – the cost of turning the lights on before any work gets done
• Incremental cost – the cost of processing one more item
• Cycle time – how much time elapses processing one item from start to finish