Knowledge Systems Risk Assessment
Give Me Three Hours, I'll Tell You Where to Look...
So now you have decided that you would like to work on your Knowledge Systems, but you don't know where to start?? Nothing could be simpler. Well, something could, but please allow me the mild hyperbole.
With our unique Knowledge Systems Risk Assessment, we will evaluate 105 different "shoeboxes": the product of:
Three areas of intellectual capital [Human, Structural, and Relationship]
Five knowledge operations [Creation, Elicitiation, Exploitation, Distribution and Evaluation], and
Seven attributes of operations [Efficiency, Effectiveness, Risk Exposure, Replicability, Exploitiveness, Explorativeness and Renewability]
Give me six to twelve of your managers and three hours of an afternoon, and we will complete an assessment instrument to evaluate your Knowledge Systems against all the above dimensions, providing you with a description of which of the 105 boxes you should be looking at more closely. It will include an assessment of your company, your competitors and your industry. All delivered within a few weeks of the initial interview, based on your schedule. The champion's report session will take about an hour, and you will have an extremely clear picture of your next steps. The final meeting, with the entire group, will take ninety minutes to two hours.
Assessment of Your Desired Position
Using a battery of almost 200 questions, we can determine what level of importance each of the 105 b0xes has for your particular situation. No two companies will ever have the same scores on this assessment, and it keeps you and me from wasting time working on things that are not important to you. We also will know which boxes are in sufficient order that we don't need to do a deeper dive. If the 200 questions sound intimidating, don't worry - the exercise is structured so that we are done in about 30 minutes. With ten seconds for each question, this is a fast-paced but effective collection of well over a thousand data points about where the company would like to be, and how it would like to be perceived.
Assessment of Your Current Position
After the first session is concluded and we take a short break, we will jump into the meat of the evaluation, where you are today. Using a larger battery, over 300 questions, split into two thirty-minute sessions, will help us uncover your company's position: relative to where you would want to be, where you perceive your competitors to be located and where you perceive your standing within your industry overall. We can offer a degree of insight into these competitive and industrial standings, but I am certain that you understand that we cannot provide details of other companies. After all, you wouldn't want us discussing your results with anyone else.
After running your 3,000 to 6,000 data points through our own analytics engine, we will have a firm idea not only of which rocks we should be looking under, but how big that rock probably is and how much of what we might find there. Specific projects to implement based on this report will practically leap from the page, not only on what to do, but what the most likely outcome and benefit would be.
There are features and provisions within the evaluation process that will keep the data as pertinent and undiluted as possible. Managers are requested to "opt out" of questions where they have no operational knowledge, avoiding uninformed or forced choices. With all scores being normalized to a range of zero to one, there is no penalty nor advantage to having a large or small number of responses. From a managerial point of view, assessment champions are provided with a "by name" list of all the managers who have "opted out" of which questions, so that we can see that all those who should have an opinion have weighed in and those who shouldn't have not. All in all, this is the most complete and accurate estimate of "where do I start" that you could find.
Report, Deliverables and Cost Basis
The report format will provide to the commissioning manager a bound notebook containing normalized scores against desired positioning, where your company stands compared to where you want to be. A score of 1 would indicate that your current position equals your desired position within any particular "shoebox". I will also identify for you the priority ranking of each of the 105 "shoeboxes" so that we can begin to focus on the most critical ones. For each of the selected "shoeboxes", I can recommend specific further evaluation to quantify and focus any corrective actions you want to undertake. The report will also include a variability analysis that allows you to see the range of, and therefore the confidence in, responses to every of the 105 "shoeboxes" . Lastly, as indicated above, a complete roster of "opt out" responses will be included.
Included with the report itself, I will conduct an initial prepping interview with the champion to arrange the afternoon for the actual assessment. We will then conduct the data gathering session, and I will provide a draft report to the champion, which we will discuss to see if there is any further inquiry or "redirection" that the champion would like conducted. There is then a final report briefing to the champion, in advance of a final meeting with the entire group of participants, explaining the results and answering any questions.
The cost basis of this engagement provides for full access to our counsel by any and all participants throughout the term of the engagement, between the initial meeting with the champion and the final meeting with the entire group of participants. There are no restrictions on contact by any participant in the assessment, and I do not bill for any specific contact or hours worked. Call me at 832.298.4940, e-mail me at galen@galenmcpherson.com, or simply use the "Contact Us" link for a firm quotation for your Knowledge Systems Risk Assessment today.
