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Organisational memory
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Today organisations operate in a chaotic environment battling against continuous change and facing demanding, often impossible, timescales to deliver. If we ignore this chaos, it will eventually erode the organisation to the point where it is unable to operate cost-effectively, think clearly and move smartly in an increasingly unpredictable world. Chaotic organisations provide a breeding ground for uncertainties and negative perceptions, which lead to ill-informed decision-making and irrational organisational behaviour.
These conditions will manifest themselves in the real world as deteriorating customer relations, poor staff performance and an underachieving organisation, unable to meets its goals and the ambitions of its stakeholders. However, a closer look at organisational chaos through its symptoms, causes and effects provides a more telling picture of what is happening in many of today's organisations.
Symptoms of Organisational Chaos
The symptoms of a chaotic organisation which are visible to customers include:
- Poor quality of service delivery.
- Continuously time constrained and stressful working conditions.
- Inability to meet and exceed customer expectations or performance targets.
Causes of Organisational Chaos
The causes of a chaotic organisation which staff and partners operate in and work around, include situations where:
- Information is stored and knowledge is managed in an ad hoc manner, usually across multiple locations, departments and teams;
- Information access and knowledge retrieval is time-consuming and difficult because no one knows where it is held.
- Systems may be incompatible and may act as barriers to sharing and retrieval activities.
- Working practices and governance procedures for managing information and knowledge may be ineffectual or non existent;
- Staff have a reluctance to share information, work collaboratively or lack the incentives to do so.
- Staff and partners are constantly fire-fighting - they don't know why problems are occurring, tend to address symptoms but unable to eliminate its root causes.
Effects of Organisational Chaos
The overall effects of a chaotic organisation are lasting and will certainly influence the organisation's performance. They could include one or more of the following:
- Poor quality service delivery will encourage your competitors to take the initiative, as well as your work, staff, customers and revenue streams.
- Increasing stress levels provides for an unhealthy work-life balance, ultimately leading to the organisation losing its best and most talented people.
- A disaffected workforce will eventually increase cost of sale/delivery and overburden the scarce resource-pool.
- Failing to exceed customer expectations will stop them calling you when they need someone they can trust.
Organisational Memory: Driver for Change
Organisations, through the talents of the individuals they employ, generate knowledge from everyday working practices. This is sometimes referred to as 'intellectual capital'. These same organisations are keen to adopt flexible workforce models to make their operations agile and services more adaptive to ever-changing market conditions. Consequentially, making the most of intellectual capital created by talented individuals - both past and present is becoming increasingly important. For an organisation to be less chaotic it must learn to be responsive and amenable to change.
Building the confidence to adapt and embrace the dynamic and unpredictable world businesses operate in requires organisations to own and be conscious of developing their 'Organisational Memory'.
Importance of Organisational Memory
A good memory is important to organisations seeking to remain responsive and competitive, whilst operating in uncertain business conditions where they face:
- A very fluid and flexible employment market.
- Demands of moving towards a multi-skilled and flexible pool of shared resources.
- Change becoming more rapid and discontinuous, whilst impossible to predict, future organisation's will be judged by how they adapt and evolve.
- Phenomenal and infinite growth is predicted in data sources, information repositories and knowledge pools available to support their decisions.
Applying Organisational Memory
Examples of where significant benefits can be realised from a good organisational memory are usually found in collaborative working situations. Here flexible resources are used to form cross-disciplined teams or semi-permanent project structures, co-ordinated to deliver joined-up outcomes such as: policy documents; performance targets; conduct consultations; produce reports; develop bid/tender for funding; or even make a judgement on a case file which has been open over a long period of time.
Further examples of where organisational memory strategies can be applied are illustrated below:
Project Delivery - Collaborative Output - Workgroup:
- Funding Bids or Sales Tender Process.
- Professional Service Practises.
- Policy Development Teams.
Service Delivery - Process Driven Output - Workflow:
- Business Process Outsourcing/Managed Services.
- Helpdesks/Contact Centres.
Other Related Areas:
- Outsourcing Strategy - 'Maintain your Intellectual Property'.
- Accommodation Strategy - 'Move Buildings and Create Dynamic Innovative Communities'.
- Customer Management Strategy.
- Smarter/Flexible Working Strategy.
- Meeting the needs of the 'Joined up' Government ethos.
Knowledge Audit: The Way Forward
Conducting a knowledge audit is the first step to developing an organisation's memory. The audit will gather the evidence to help identify the initiatives required to build your organisations memory.
The objectives of the knowledge audit are to:
- Reduce duplication of information and knowledge gathering activities across different departments, teams or individuals, and hence remove duplication of costs.
- Improve the quality of decision-making across the department, based on the common storage and understanding of information.
- Nurture an environment where communities in the organisation and individuals constantly renew and share their knowledge assets, enabling them to perform their highly competent work.
- Introduce information management policies and standards.
- The knowledge audit provides the first step in an evolutionary and incremental approach to building organisational memory by helping to understand where you are now.
If you have any questions about the subjects covered in this white paper or you would like to find out more about how Oakleigh Consulting could help your organisation, please contact us on 0161 835 4100 or email us.
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