The 3 common traits of optimized organizations

People and processes – Part II

At the end of the day, optimization is about getting your organization to produce results faster and at the lowest possible cost.

As I wrote in part I of this post (People and processes part I)), I believe there are three traits shared by organizations that optimize their people and processes successfully:

1. Transparency: They define processes in a practical way
2. Measurability: They define their parameters for success
3. Automatization: They use tools that help standardize processes, but at the same time, do so in a flexible and practical way

While these three prerequisites to optimization are in no way trivial, they are definitely possible with the right approach. The rest of this post offers a description of each characteristic, and some tips for how to achieve it.

LinkedIn and Twitter updates

Are you also getting more and more annoyed of useless Twitter updates on LinkedIn?

I am - but since LinkedIn does not provide a setting allowing you only to elinimate Twitter updates the consequence is that I am now hiding updates from all people redirectiing their Twitter updates to LinkedIn...

Here is how to do it:

In the upper right corner of a status update from a peson you click "Hide". This will effectively hide all updates from that person (including Twitter, TripIt and other useless updates).

People and processes - Part I

The thing that makes knowledge-based organizations tick is people and processes. Some organizations seem to operate like the old “Bornholmer” clock – manual winding required, not quite accurate, looking a bit antiquated but still ticking away in its own quiet pace.

Others seem to be top-tuned like a sophisticated pulse watch and capable of adjusting and reflecting the exact performance at any given time. This kind of organization knows its present state and what to do to get even better – the people and the processes feel he heartbeat and optimizes continuously.

Surely it is interesting to understand the difference between these two kinds of organizations.

It’s not just ESDH!

In Denmark the category for the kind of software solutions we do at ScanJour for many years has been called ESDH – “Electronic case and document management”.

Personally I am really not a big fan of acronyms, buzzwords and narrow categorization of software. Most software I have been part of creating typically can do so much more than their “category” indicates. Anyways, the categories are typically invented by analyst companies and are frequently changing in an effort to try keeping the interest from their readers and thus becoming less useful.

@ Microsoft WPC

I am currently attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Los Angeles and thought I wanted to share a few impressions from the conference so far.

I was invited by Microsoft as part of ScanJour to attend the conference including a pre-conference day on Sunday – the “partnering executive summit” – for a selected number of around 200 partners (the conference has around 15000 participants in total).

Servicing citizens digitally

In todays papers in Denmark you can read about municipalities failing to respond adequately to 2 out of 5 digital requests from citizens (read: Version2 article).

As a citizen I can see why it sometimes becomes difficult to communicate digitally with municipalities and other public bodies in a simple way. The current implementations of public websites in Denmark (e.g. http://www.blogger.com/www.rudersdal.dk) seems to be very focused at exposing information to the readers (and the thesis seems to be the more the better) as opposed to letting the users get in touch with the various public bodies in a simple way.Coming from a world of software development another approach would be to look at user scenarios and then start by designing the websites with possibilities for handling the most commonly (volume based) scenarios right from the frontpage.

The first post

After a month and a half in my new job as CTO of ScanJour I thought it was about time to get a blog started.

You may wonder why the blog is in english...given that so many of our customers in ScanJour are within the public sector in Denmark.

Well - first of all I'm sure that people working in the public sector in Denmark also speaks english. Actually I believe that more and more people within public service become exposed to other languages than danish - not at least considering the the growing EU legislation. Secondly - and more important - ScanJour do have customers outside Denmark and this in fact means that our primary written language in ScanJour R&D is english. Since we have many non-danish speaking talents as part of our R&D team it becomes even more so a necessity to communicate in english.

But enough of that, my intention with this blog (regardless of language) is to provide my personal view and comments on our products and how they can be used by our customers and users.

If you have comments to the bog, feel free to post them - also in danish if you prefer that.

Flemming