About D3D | | March 16th, 2009
What are the decisions keeping your people awake at night?
The root causes of this anxiety is usually the lack of appropriate information. Unfortunately, no one ever seems to have all the information they need when it comes time to decide.
The irony is that your own tools, processes and behaviors may be limiting the information flow you need to make better decisions.
Decision 3D provides a proprietary process, called Decision Due Diligence, that will improve the information flow in your organization. Decision Due Diligence addresses both the mechanics (tools and processes) and the behaviors that affect information flow.
Our logic is simple:
- Better decisions lead to better results.
- Improving your information flow will lead to better decisions.
- Decision 3D can improve your information flow.
Check out the resources on this site and contact us to discuss your specific situation. We provide a range of services that can meet your budget requirements.
Mission
To improve decision making with better information flow.
Premise
Effective decisions are the product of having:
- the best possible information
- at the optimal decision point
- at the right time.
Approach
Decision 3D aligns the use of information tools with organizational behavior to improve information flow.
Process
Decision 3D provides an environmental assessment, builds a custom collaboration environment, engages stakeholders, and facilitates an internal design team to deliver a solution that will optimize your information flow.
Tags: decision due diligence, decision making
Tech | | March 12th, 2009
Sharepoint: Good or Bad
Thomas Vanderwal just posted his long awaited commentary on Microsoft Sharepoint. It is an intriguing and insightful reporting of what Sharepoint users have reported to him over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, Thomas’s final commentary is that Sharepoint does some things well, just don’t call it social software. In his own words:
SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focused on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.
The post prompted a rebuttal from Bil Simser. Bil’s main counterpoint is built around the idea that though Sharepoint is not excellent in all areas, it does integrate all of its functions, which is a plus. In his words:
SharePoint is a lot of things and like a lot of “suites” it does a lot of things pretty good. Some pretty good, some great, some not so great.
Bil goes on to discuss how a best of breed approach only shifts time and expense over to the integration side as opposed to initial development of an overall enterprise system.
Focus on Requirements Definition
The underlying thread in both of these posts is that understanding and delivering user needs and requirements is paramount in delivery of any system. For any organization to begin a conversation about what information technology it needs with a discussion of the technology itself is a recipe for failure. The discussion of solutions must begin with a clear definition of business objectives. The discussion of technology should be the last link in the chain of conversations.
Maybe Hugh says it best:
Tags: Collaboration, gapingvoid, requirements definition, sharepoint, Social Technology Tools, thomas vanderwal
Tech | | March 03rd, 2009
I had an interesting exchange today on Twitter with Valdis Krebs, an acclaimed expert in the field of Social Network Analysis (SNA). I have known about SNA for a while but have never studied it in depth. As I am developing the product offering for Decision 3D, I am coming to the conclusion that SNA will inevitably need to be part of that offering, but I still don’t think that SNA is the core of Decision Due Diligence.
In my mind Decision Due Diligence has more of a personal feel than you get from an overall network analysis. The process specifically accounts for the emotions and behaviors of the players, or nodes in SNA jargon, along with the actual mechanics involved in passing information between nodes. So the importance of links, from a Decision Due Diligence perspective, is to a large degree self-contained. On the other hand the importance of links in SNA is a function of where the link exists with respect to other links.
Upon reflection, I think the two approaches are perfectly complementary. If you can understand the dynamics of a specific link as well as how that link fits into the larger system, you have a powerful tool for understanding information flow within an organization.
As I was working on this post, the term Social Connection Analysis (SCA) jumped into my head, and I think that is the right label for the concept I am addressing above, and the thing I was trying to address with @valdiskrebs in the twitter exchange you see to the right. Where the core of SNA is understanding the aggregate of all the connections in a network, the core of SCA is understanding the specifics of any one connection within the network.
Tags: decision due diligence, sca, SNA, social connection analysis, social network analysis, Valdis Krebs
Tech | | March 02nd, 2009
Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be a powerful tool for helping organizations solve operational problems. HR Executive Online just published an article that gives some great examples of how this is the case. Decision Due Diligence, the process developed by Decision 3D is based on many of the principles defined by SNA. The fundamental point is that understanding how people connect is critical to being able to improve how an organization operates.
From the article:
Social-networking analysis, or SNA, focuses on the mapping and measuring of flows of knowledge and information between people, groups or organizations. In other words, it’s a sophisticated and useful evaluation of the company grapevine.
If you think the approach discussed in the article may be worth looking into further, you may also want to look at our approach.
Tags: HR Executive, Scott Westcott, SNA, Valdis Krebs
About D3D | | February 24th, 2009
Decision Due Diligence is the core process of Decision 3D. I have described it at a high level on this website and in my Slideshare presentation. In this post I want to begin a deeper dive into what it looks like in practice. This post will be an overview of the process and subsequent posts will provide more detail of the separate process phases.
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Objective
The purpose of Decision Due Diligence is to allow an organization to gain a better understanding of the factors that are inhibiting information flow and to develop steps to minimize those factors. The hope is that with freer information flow within an organization, decision makers will be more effective at gathering the information they need and therefore be able to make better decisions.
What It Is
Decision Due Diligence (DDD) is not a platform for performance or some kind of general tool that everyone benchmarks against. It is a focused point solution. You use DDD to address a specific operating problem, at a specific point in time, looking for specific, quantifiable improvements in your operations. Once the process is complete, you hope to have three persistent outcomes.
- Improved results
- A new understanding, by participants in the process, of how information flow can be optimized, hopefully leading to fewer information flow restrictions in the future
- The ability to repeat the process elsewhere in the organization to address other operating problems
How It Works
Decision Due Diligence is a multi-stage process. The stages are:
- Assessment
- Analysis
- Model Development
- Idealized Design
- Planning
- Implementation
Assessment
- define the problem,
- identify desired outcomes,
- create initial list of stakeholders
Stakeholders in this case means any entity that influences or is influenced by the decisions core to the situation.
Analysis
- gather stakeholder input about connections
- extend stakeholder list as necessary
- compile stakeholder input about connections
- assign initial values to connections, “Priority”, “Alignment”, “Synchronization”
Connections are the links or relationships between any given pair of stakeholders.
Model Development
- create collaborative workspace showing aggregated Analysis
- invite commentary and feedback from stakeholders regarding aggregated Analysis
- identify key connections (between stakeholders)
Idealized Design
- organize focal event, preferably live, face-to-face and facilitated
- design ideal scenario
- compare to analysis/model results
- identify pragmatic steps to get from “here to there”
- form implementation team
Planning
- convene implementation team
- establish governance, including stakeholder access and feedback to proceedings
- develop project plan for implementation
- define success metrics
Implementation
- implement plan
- monitor and report metrics
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OK there it is. Maybe a bit wonkish, but I want to have this all spelled out so it can be referenced as necessary. I will be adding posts shortly, providing more detail about how each of the six phases will look in practice.
Tags: decision due diligence
