Integration of business information and processes is a key core competence
for every competence. It offers businesses a huge competitive advantage
in
- time-to-market,
- quality, and
- cost if carried out well,
and a crippling disadvantage if either ignored or poorly executed.
I offer consultancy to industrial companies on the following topics:
Turn Your Design Information Into Knowledge
Knowledge is the ability to turn information and data into effective
action. In many cases this is surprisingly easy to do. Key points
are:
- Benefit Business need must be
foremost, not the consideration of the IT department.
- Transparency People involved in
the process need to be able to see all relevant information. This
requires policy decisions on who “owns” the information and sharing
between departments.
- Think big but start small Knowledge
management projects need to be kept small and nimble. However, all
solutions generated must be scalable. For example, a solution developed
for mechanical design must be scalable to an integrated design system.
Be There First And Get It Right
Increasing maturity of the available technology means that it is
now realistic to integrate different design and business processes.
This integration offers huge gains in:
- Speed Based on experience, we
can expect to reduce the design or business process time by between
30% and a factor of 5.
- Quality Problems due to missing
or incorrectly transferred information disappear. For example, in
September 1999, the NASA Mars Orbiter (cost $125M) was lost due
to a mistake in design information transfer between Lockheed and
NASA; the former used Imperial units, the latter metric.
- Cost Costs are reduced through
savings in business process time and through the elimination of
the regeneration of already existing, but not accessible, information.
(For example, when two departments maintain identical information
because they have no sharing mechanism.)
