Category Archives: Knowledge Management

The Importance of the Job Description to your Talent Management Strategy

A few months ago I brought you a post on Purchasing Certification as a Savings Strategy that described the significant ROI that a company can expect to obtain by getting their entire purchasing department trained and certified. A department-wide certification ensures consistent processes and results across your purchasing team and insures that your overall performance, and, more importantly, whether or not you meet you savings targets, does not rely solely on a handful of star performers. Although it’s true that a star purchaser will often save three, five, or even ten times as much as an average purchaser, just like your star salesperson will often sell three, five, or even ten times as much as your average performer, betting the company on a single individual is akin to betting on a horse to win at the track. Not a strategy I’d bet my company on.

The post served as another example of how critical talent management is to today’s company, and today’s purchasing / procurement / supply management department in particular with commodity, raw material, and energy prices rising across the board in a stagnant economy where even holding prices steady might not be enough to keep a company in the black. Talent management, which starts with the acquisition process and extends to the eventual retirement of your talent, is a complicated topic and includes the marketing strategy you use to convince people to consider you as an employer.

Part of the marketing strategy you use to attract new talent is the job description, and even though you might not give it much thought, it turns out that getting this job description right is extremely important. As pointed out in a recent Next Level Purchasing (now the Certitrek NLPA) white-paper, an outdated purchasing job description can have undesirable effects on a company’s talent management strategy. According to Next Level Purchasing, there are two severe consequences associated with using outdated purchasing job descriptions:

  • an outdated purchasing job description is likely to attract a purchaser who possessed the skills necessary for succeeding in previous years, but who does not possess the skills necessary for success today
  • an outdated purchasing job description can set the bar too low for the standard skill levels to which your current professionals will aspire

As a former R&D director, I can attest to the importance of a good job description. Without one, your probability of attracting the right candidate are low. For instance, although I can remember having to sift through fifty to one hundred applications on a regular basis just to find three to five candidates worth an interview even with a good job description, I can also remember more than one occasion where I did not get to write the job description and where I could not identify one suitable candidate among dozens upon dozens of applications. So what did this tell me? A bad job description was very unlikely to yield good candidates and a good job description, which was much more likely to yield good candidates, also served as a good foundation for eliminating those candidates obviously inappropriate for the job without the need for a lengthy interview process.

The white-paper also outlined the important components of today’s purchasing job descriptions, and, like many of the articles that Next Level Purchasing makes available on its website, is worth at least a once-over.

The Comic Art of Strategic Intelligence Using Nanotech Digital Forensics in Sustainable Business

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that the U.S. economy will add 15.6 million jobs in the decade between 2006 and 2016. But those jobs won’t be evenly split across regions or industries. Many traditional industries, like manufacturing, will see declines. Industries that hire graduates of popular majors in business, social sciences / history, and education may see a rise if the opportunity is there, but may not. But since not every student has the aptitude to be successful in these fields, and since many will ultimately have to take positions outside of these fields of research due to limited jobs in these fields today, it’s hard for a college student these days to pick a major these days that’s likely to land him or her a job.

That’s why it was good to see an article in the current edition of The Futurist on “Majoring in the Unusual” that highlighted degrees in unusual fields from the recent edition of “They Teach That In College?” that might help a new graduate secure a job in an emerging field.

The article highlighted the following five fields as the most eye-catching:

  • Sustainable Business
  • Computer & Digital Forensics
  • Comic Book Art
  • Nanotechnology
  • Strategic Intelligence

… and, in my view, among the most lucrative. Here’s why:

  • Sustainability is soon going to be a necessity. You can follow the doctor and lead the way or get caught up in the tide.
  • Everything is “e” these days. Since you can’t follow someone who never leaves their office, the days of Sam Spade and Dixon Hill are coming to an end. Digital is here, like it or not.
  • Die hards will hold onto books for a long time, but the days of the text-based books are coming to an end as we read more and more on our computers and e-readers. But since e-readers still can’t replicate the texture of art on the page, graphic novel and comic sales are going to stay strong for a while.
  • We love miniaturization … and nanotech, which will be very useful in medicine, is miniaturization to the extreme. It’s true we might accidentally build replicators, but it’s also true that the new large hadron collider might destroy the planet next month, and we built that.
  • Considering that, in the doctor‘s view, most businesses don’t have a lot of intelligence to begin with , there’s always a need for strategic intelligence!

The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network – A Useful Resource for Sourcing Professionals

Not too long ago, the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network was brought to my attention. Even though I was afraid that it might be another Supply Chain Social Network, I decided to check it out anyway. I’m glad I did. It’s along the lines of the type of Knowledge Network that I’ve been promoting behind the scenes for a while now — and I’m glad to see that they’re starting to appear.

The site supports two types of members: Premium Member and Associate Member. Premium memberships cost 149.99 a year and come with exclusive access to Shared Services News magazine, regular e-newsletters, full access to online articles, and upcoming job section access and three free job postings a year. Free associate memberships come with access to some of the articles on the site, the regular monthly newsletter, up to four specialist alerts, and basic access to the upcoming job section.

I signed up for a free associate membership. The Industry News goes back four months, and is indexed on five topics (strategy & governance, process & technology, people & culture, customer satisfaction, and globalization) and four functions (human resources, IT, finance & accounting, and other). The networking is limited to knowledge sharing Q&A forums and Blogs (which include Peter Allen from TPI, Sam Poston of ScottMadden Inc, Dave Griebl of Monster Worldwide, and Ed Martinez of BellSouth Affiliate Services Corporation). The event listings are reasonably well populated, and broken down by Continent and Country and there are numerous resources for on-line learning including interviews, presentations, podcasts, and webinars.

In all, I think it’s a good resource for sourcing professionals who need to manage shared services or outsource business processes. There’s a significant amount of information available for free members, and with over 7,000 global members, a wealth of information available for premium members – which I believe would be a great investment for any organization that’s looking for a shared services or outsourcing partner. Take a few moments and check it out. I think it will be worth your time.

Strategic Service Knowledge Management a la Servigistics

Knowledge Management is the process of identifying, creating, representing, and distributing knowledge to those who need it. It’s a broad subject with definitions that focus on the technology, organizational, and sometimes even ecological aspects. As noted by Wikipedia, schools of thought include those that focus on intellectual capital, social planning, information theory, value networks, and even complexity while concepts tend to revolve around the dimensions of knowledge, the different stages of a knowledge-related activity where knowledge is required, and both structured and unstructured, planned and ad-hoc knowledge access.

The reality is that any definition of knowledge management will be contingent on the knowledge you need to manage and the definition that is right for you will be the one that not only addresses your issues but allows you to define and measure value. With respect to strategic service management, a knowledge management solution is one that allows your service personnel to access the knowledge they need, when they need it, and to contribute new knowledge quickly and easily to the knowledge base. It should also allow your customers to access the knowledge that is appropriate to them when they need it, in a format that makes sense to them. And it should be very easy to manage and maintain.

Specifically, it should make problems easy to diagnose and identify by a technician so that they can quickly get to a solution. To this end, it should support free search for advanced users, guided search for novice users, and direct solution access for expert users who know the system well. It should also support multimedia so that users can identify problems visually, and, if appropriate, audibly as well. The indexed solutions should be structured to not only allow information display at various levels of detail, but to allow a user to quickly jump to the portion of the solution they need.

Servigistics’ knowledge management solution allows for free-text search, guided search, and direct access by index values. It supports images, audio, and video that can be included in both problem descriptions and solutions and enables information to be be coded for display at different levels of detail depending on the user.

If the user has the right permissions, the user can update the knowledge store on the spot – which allows expert technicians to capture their knowledge as soon as they identify a new problem and a new solution. It also includes your standard “rate the usefulness of this solution” feature that not only allows users to give their feedback, but affects the order in which solutions are displayed, or queries asked, in the future as the system learns with each access. And it incorporates natural language processing which allows a solution to be found even if the search terms don’t appear in the solution as it is capable of identifying similar terms and concepts.

Now, if you’re an expert in KM, or someone who studied it ten (10) years ago, you’ll realize that there are no revolutionary features incorporated in Servigistics’ knowledge management product, as all of these features were being worked on ten (10) years ago, but you’ll also know that generic KM solutions not customized for a particular problem domain tend not to be very useful. The reality is that case-based reasoning, dynamic questioning, natural language search, and similar techniques aren’t perfect, and their accuracy degrades (rapidly) as the breadth of the solution decreases. Furthermore, people in different professions tend to work in different ways (as they are trained in different ways) and no generic solution is going to please everyone. This means that the right solution isn’t the most advanced solution, but a solution tailored to your problem domain that incorporates the most appropriate technologies.

To this end, I believe Servigistics’ offering, which is one of the first Knowledge Management solutions for the Strategic Service Management domain, is a good solution. It meets the basic requirements. It’s easy to configure and use. It’s accessible by support representatives, technicians, and customers and it can be configured to show each user the information at the right level of detail in a view tailored to them. And it integrates with their command center and the rest of their Strategic Service Management Suite, allowing each user to access it quickly and easily when they need to. It’s definitely the right approach.

The Back Office. It Will Power Platform Evolution As Well.

Originally posted on the Synertrade blog in October, 2018.

A few months ago we penned a piece on the back office and how it powers platforms. We indicated that the only way a platform could deal with the facts that

  1. (Procurement) workflows are not static and change over time, whether or not you want them to or not;
  2. the type of data you need to ingest, as well as the quality and representation thereof changes over time; and this means that
  3. RPA requirements also change over time

is if such a platform had a great back office. A back office with functionality that allows you to do more than just define users, look and feel, and the categorization schema. A back office that allows an administrator to update the master schema, data harmonization rules, organizational hierarchy, workflow processes, approval chains, and RPA workers. And so on.

But this is just platform maintenance. A platform needs to evolve over time. As per Sourcing Innovation’s recent series on 2020 is Fast Approaching — Better Get on Your Tech Capabilities (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV), 2020 is almost here and the magnificent picture of Procurement in 2020 that all the big analyst firms and thought leadership vendors painted between 2008 and 2013 (check the modern Wayback Machine if you don’t remember, unless you have the original WABAC machine) has not materialized. To be blunt, the picture today, for the most part, is not much better than it was ten (10) years ago. There have been few advances in platform capabilities, although there has been considerable advances in usability and integration. Source to Pay offerings, non-existent in the best-of-breed focussed world (where there were a couple of S2C and a couple of P2P offerings) of a decade ago, are now the norm. And they are quite useable. But are they more powerful?

Consider the eight capabilities mentioned in Sourcing Innovation’s recent posts which were supposed to be, more-or-less, common place. How many does your platform have? Maybe a couple if you are lucky. Maybe. But let’s review the capabilities you should have.

  • True Invoice Automation (with human intervention necessary on less than 2%)
  • Supplier Identification
  • Automated Supplier Discovery
  • RFX Process Automation
  • Should Cost Modelling

If your platform doesn’t have these capabilities, or doesn’t have them to the extent it should (and we can guarantee no platform yet has all of these capabilities to the extent it should, the best you can hope for is a platform actively working towards the goal), the only way you’re going to get them is if the platform has built-in foundations for evolutionary capabilities.

What are these necessary capabilities?

As previously discussed, workflow automation, schema extensibility, and RPA (robotic process automation) are key. But so are open integration (and a fully exposed and extensible API), unlimited supplier (pool) access, and extensible cost and product modelling. These are key capabilities that many platforms are missing, and, key capabilities that, when present, are found in a back-office that powers the platform. (And that’s why the back office will power platform evolution too.)

Most platforms, even those that tout integration, don’t have truly open integration. There is a limited API, and if the external platform or data feed can’t map to it one-to-one, there is no true integration — only what can be mapped.

Most platforms have their own S-MDM (Supplier Master Data Management) capability and some either offer their own network or integrate with one. But it’s still very closed. Right now there are a number of networks, a number of directories, and a number of collective initiatives out there, each of which is controlled by a vendor using a different (often proprietary) technology. There’s no real openness. A vendor must commit to not building its own network of any kind, but integrating with whatever network its suppliers are on that they want to use.

Only a few platforms have should-cost modelling and bill of materials capability even today — even though, at some point in the supply chain, every product is a bill of materials and every service is a collection of task-based service offerings. Only a platform that allows these common components to be defined and re-used is going to provide an organization with evolutionary offerings.

So when you go out to select your S2P platform, if you want a best-of-breed platform that will not only offer the best of what’s available today, but meet your needs tomorrow, be sure to select one with a back-office capability that, in addition to the key requirements outlined last time, also allows for true open integration, for true supplier network/portal interoperability, and true, composable, bill-of-material based should-cost modelling capability. Otherwise, there will be limits to what the platform can do and you will never get a true strategic offering from the vendor and never, ever, reach cognitive support capabilities.