in this issue

Fast Innovation

Press Release: EPSScentral on Winning Team for DoD Business Transformation Agency's 'Thought Leadership and Change Management' Contract, Valued at Up to $260 Million

Why Electronic Health Records Are Worth the Hype -- and the Price

Beyond Google and evil: How policy makers, journalists and consumers should talk differently about Google and privacy

Salvation or destruction: Metaphors of the Internet

Michael George

From the back cover:

"My understanding of innovation has been enlarged through my interactions with Mike. I am grateful that in the writing of this book Mike has relied upon my research and that I have similarly been able to build upon his understanding. I thank him for providing all of us with the set of practical implementation tools presented in this book."

CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, author of The Innovators Dilemma, The Innovators Solution, and Seeing What's Next

"Growth through innovation is key to Eli Lilly and Company. To serve our commitment to meeting medical needs and achieve our growth goals requires more innovation, faster innovation and, at the same time, less resource consumption and risk. This book identifies some of the significant changes in strategy and tactics needed for an innovation process to achieve these goals. Every executive concerned with the changing business of innovation would do well to become familiar with the principles contained in this book."

ALPHEUS BINGHAM, Vice President, Lilly Research Laboratories Strategy, Eli Lilly and Company

"Texas Instruments recognizes the importance of creating highly differentiated products with faster time to market as the driver of profitable growth. In this book, you will receive the strategic insight and the practical tool set needed to significantly improve your company's rate of successful innovations. I encourage every executive who is interested in accelerating the growth of his business to read this book."

EMERY POWELL, New Product Development, Texas Instruments Inc.
 

Wayfinding in an Age of Economic Challenge

Being competent on the job means that you know your role and can find your way around mission-critical business processes. A very descriptive term that is sometimes used in this context is wayfinding, which addresses four simple questions about your world of work: Where am I? Where do I want to go? Am I on the right path? Am I there yet? The destination is a so-called deliverable or one of its components. To produce it, the wayfinding expert is always in the right place, knows what to do next and knows when he or she has arrived (completed the task). Competency also means knowing how your role relates to everyone else in the business process and, at a high level, knowing how it all enables the organizational mission.

The challenge of ensuring competency is creating a workforce of wayfinding experts through the business lifecycle. Specific challenges include business process dynamics, complexity and employees coming and going. How, then, is an organization to ensure competency, continuously and efficiently - especially in times of economic challenge? Here is what we've discovered.

Organizations either do not have documented business processes or, if they do, they are not current, accessible and usable to support wayfinding. Nothing jumps out to provide guidance and information when the worker needs it, and it is especially not provided at the speed of work. Further, organizations that attempt to provide such resources are not aware of best practices. Many are perhaps familiar with the concept of performance support and are aware of tools that capture, document and disseminate process and knowledge, but they lack quality methods and skills to apply the right tools to connect systems, integrate manual processes, and place usable knowledge squarely in the business process context.

So what are the required elements? At the speed of work:

• Capture end-to-end business processes, inside and outside of enterprise systems.
• Generate the knowledge assets required to do the job.
• Connect knowledge assets to processes in such a way that they are visible, accessible and enable wayfinding ("process-knowledge").

"The speed of work" means to do these things rapidly, in pace with the rate of business change and what it takes to achieve the organizational mission.

Addressing competency in this way substantially reduces the need to train workers in advance. It makes process-knowledge representations organic, meaning always relevant and always alive. Organizations that have adopted these tools and methods have realized minimum ten-fold returns on investment. In concrete terms, a $100,000 investment yields a $1,000,000 return. A simple combination of two or three carefully selected development tools while applying a quality methodology like Performance-Centered Design (PCD^TM) achieves such results. Ten-fold is the minimum ROI. It's really not amazing. It's now routine. Totally achievable. And hard to ignore - especially in these economic times. Come visit our booth at the OSDBU conference on April 22nd - http://www.fbcinc.com/osdbu09/ - to see a live demo of how we apply this approach with our customers, or simply contact us at your convenience. We are happy to share the details.

Regards,
 
Gary J. Dickelman
President & CEO, EPSScentral LLC

(by Ellen McGirt / www.fastcompany.com / May 2009)

A contemporary lesson is performance at the speed of work, focusing on health care.

(by Chris Jay Hoofnagle / First Monday / April 2009)

Privacy in the approach to the semantic web: Google walks the tightrope.

(by Rebecca Johnston / First Monday / April 2009)

Metaphors we live by in the age of the Internet.