Note: Apologies for seeming absent. The end of another semester in my Masters in Informatics program is looming.
This post comes from a discussion on Change Managment in my systems analysis and design course. The guest lecturer put up a slide with this diagram:
My hand shot up and I asked why an organization would want to go to all the trouble of "thawing" a frozen business process, convincing workers to look at what they do differently and accept the value of new ways of working, only to re-freeze the new process and revert to a state in which the next change will be just as difficult?
A classmate who works in IT for a well known multi-national banking organization offered the example of a department moving to a new location. He supposed that they had developed an entirely new set of procedures for handling the physical movement of its IT systems, significantly reducing downtime and minimizing the risk of lost data. They should capture the new procedures to make sure the department and others in the organization use and benefit from the "new and improved" methodology. That's what he said was meant by re-freezing.
To me this is just another description of capturing "best practices" for re-use. The fundamental problem with best practices, to me, is that I don't believe in them.
All we can hope to capture are "best-yet" practices. By using that term, we can attempt to build in a caution to others applying the practice that they are free - indeed encouraged - to improve on the organization's previous best. (A quick web-search indicates this "best-yet" idea may not be an original concept, though I haven't had time to see if others mean it in the same way I'm using it. One example is found in an interview with author Jim Botkin, author of Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company.)
The goals in knowledge management, organizational learning, quality management, and whatever other management school you may belong to all seem to agree on the ideal of continuous improvement. The minute we start using terms like capturing or freezing what we know today, we run the risk of deluding ourselves that our so-called best practices are the same as "best-possible" practices. That is a dangerous place for a knowledge worker, or an organization, to go.
For me, the current best practice should be nothing more than one of the dots I need to connect to solve the current problem. As the tagline of this blog indicates, I believe organizations and individual knowledge workers need to develop KM systems in which capture and retrieval of past knowledge are merely one piece. At least as crucial, to me, will be developing systems that help individuals and organizations filter, comprehend, organize, and then store and retrieve, the potentially relevant bits of information that will become the rest of the dots to be connected when that next current problem presents itself.
Returning to our class discussion and the departmenal move example, I tossed back the question what if we go to the effort of recording, storing, and sharing the new IT move procedures, only to find that next year, when another department wants to move, it has become far cheaper and safer to outsource the whole process? Or buy new equipment at the new location and copy the applications and data via encrypted Internet connection, so they can be tested and put online without any downtime at all?
If we "re-froze" the prior experience into the organizational "best practices" would anyone even look for the newer, better solutions?
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