Technology support for building SIMPLE organisational tools

If the organisational leadership has the will, the technology available today can be molded into solutions that would help the frontline staff to act with agility in an environment of information overload and quick decision making requirements.

Simplicity is the new Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better and Faster – Bill Jensen (Simplicity)

An important guiding principle for organizations and people – Whoever is faster at changing rules will win more often.

It is possible when organization empowers its people to do less of what doesn’t matter and more of what does or in other words Working Smarter in a World of Infinite Choices. This means we have to start changing two habits that create work complexity and confusion:

1. We need to use time differently by changing how we organize and share what we know – how we create meaning and make sense of things.

2. We need to work backwards from what people need to work smarter. Most everyone is a lot smarter than we are letting them be.

The technological solutions provided by Portals, Enterprise Content Management, Groupware, Business Process Management in conjunction with User Experience Management (UXM) practice promise to provide a platform for building SIMPLE, user friendly and empowering solutions.

The above combination of practices are the ones which can play very important role in helping organizations to become SIMPLE. Following is a high level elaboration of this assertion:

1. Faster at changing rules more often – Business Processes enabled with state of the art BPM (Business Process Management) and BRE (Business Rules Engine) tools can empower the users to define, visualise, simulate, monitor and control business processes without overdependence on detailed coding skills.

2. Do less of what doesn’t matter and more of what matters – Workplace and Portals personalized to the role of the person removing all the clutter of information and choices. BPM and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) managing the complexities arising out of investment in different legacy applications

3. How we organize and share what we know – Taxonomy of the knowledge and content, collaboration tools

4. How we create meaning and sense of things – Enterprise Search, Information Access and Discovery tools which index and present the structured and unstructured information from across the information silos ON DEMAND.

5. Work backwards from what people need – Usability and User Experience Management (UXM) practices for designing the interfaces to ease off the presssure on the users

We have the ingredients for the solution but each organization will have unique challenges. Hence, how these components come together to meet the needs would have to be designed imaginatively and creatively.