Introduction to cultural survey
22-Sep-04
About the survey
This survey wishes to determine if there are certain organisational people/cultural aspects that ensure greater success, both for knowledge management and for process engineering. Several themes are explored:
- information/knowledge sharing
- innovation
- improvement
- process focus
It also wishes to determine the relationship between process focus, innovation and improvement. Are they mutually supportive or conflicting?
Use of survey results
Survey results will be used to:
- Provide a foundation for further EU research on sociocultural factors in knowledge management, processes, innovation and improvement
- Look at potential changes to approaches for process assessment (ISO standard 15504, known as SPICE)
Initial survey feedback will be published on KnowledgeBoard in the month after the survey.
Those respondents who enter their email addresses will be informed of the publication. No other use will be made of these addresses.
Survey analysis results will also be published in a variety of papers, made available to communities of interest including KnowledgeBoard, the SPICE User community, and EU conferences.
Background to the survey
Organisations use processes and/or practices to achieve outcomes meeting their objectives. Processes can be considered a set of related activities that may be standardised and deployed (standard/defined processes).
Practices are here considered to be activities that are not formally defined. Knowledge Management can cover information about both processes and practices, how these are recorded, disseminated and used.
A lot of early KM effort has gone into knowledge management systems and tools with varied success, similarly a lot of effort has gone into defining process lifecycles and process assessment standards with varied success.
The survey hopes to determine how socio-cultural (people related) factors affect the success of knowledge management, innovation and improvement. It also hopes to determine how process focus, innovation and improvement are related.
About the survey author
Han van Loon has been a KnowledgeBoard community member for over 2 years.
His interests lie in organisational understanding and improvement, he is both a teaching professor and consultant to industry. He led a consortium interested in handling both socio-cultural and knowledge management issues within academia and industry (esp. SMEs) within the EU FP6 framework.
Details
- Author:
- Ed Mitchell
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 22-Sep-04
- Categories:
- Processes, Innovation, Innovation
- Sections:
- News
This article has been read 10910 times.
Tools
Member comments (2)
Share your views with other users: add your own comments to this item.
help me feel confident this isn't another separate survey
Is it too much to hope for that you will get the survey coordinator signed up to this thread from the start? It is relevant to know things like whether this survey has built on the KM & Culture standards research of FP5 http://www.knowledgeboard.com/item/121482
A specific question is : is the survey author aware that process isnt necessarily the best way to map an organisation if you want to see its social/competence networks and value exchanges? I am aware language is difficult here, but I also know people who have spent 15 years looking at organisations from process perspectives and are now concluding this isnt a sufficient way to enable KM to enable esentially the two new dynamics that need to blend with organisation's process control:
how people network and self-organise
how organisations network
The ways these sub-systems structures interface impacts identiy, values and all thye soft stuff from which analysis of the health of cultural in a praticular context is usually scoped.
Survey
Hi Chris
thanks for your comments. The simple answer is that I am aware of the issues you raise. However, one of the communities that we invited into the survey is involved in process assessment (ISO15504 CoP) and we hope to see how their view of these issues is similar or differs from your (and others) viewpoints.
thanks again
Han