Information Handling and Management: How do you Fare?

Information handling is most often a quality of the people in an organization. One of the most significant factors in defining successes, it is often ignored by most organizations. For example, it is a known fact that geographies like India have manpower that are good at handling information as compared with geographies like Germany and France. This, in other words, calls for a customization of the organizational structure on the basis of the complexity that it can handle…

Where Traditional Management Fails…

If one looks at management sciences, on the contemporary front, the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) often talks of simple analysis and simple communication to make management more effective. There is, therefore, a trade-off between the simplicity aimed and the complexity that the system can handle. Do you think you have the right kind of trade-off in your company? Well, lets do a little brainstorming on this one.

Dimension I: Information Alignment

This would typically involve issues like:

  1. What information does a ‘typical’ employee of your company have?
  2. To what extent does he know the aims or the strategy of the company?
  3. Does he know the elements of his work that could affect the aims of the company?
  4. How does he incorporate his knowledge in his daily work?

Dimension II: Employee Alignment

  1. What is the employee trained as?
  2. Does his skill-set match the requirements of the position?
  3. Or are you having an overqualified and ‘under-experienced’ job market (supply)?
  4. Are improvement proposals from the employees often extending way beyond their functional and process domains?

Dimension III: Organizational Alignment

  1. What is the capacity of the organization (each department, section and individual)?
  2. Is the evaluation scientifically arrived at?
  3. Are you facing a situation of overcapacity of your management infrastructure?
  4. Is there a strong negative correlation between absenteeism and customer satisfaction?
  5. What is your view of an optimal department in terms of management infrastructure (manpower, process maps and job design)?

Dimension IV: Management Process Alignment

  1. What is the average time taken for decisions involving financial implications of:
    1. $ 100,
    2. $ 1,000,
    3. $ 10,000,
    4. $ 100,000 and
    5. $ 1 million and above?
  2. What is the average number of persons for each of these decisions?
  3. Is the criteria based on simple analysis or on complicated business models?
  4. Is the method standardized?
  5. Can it be automated?
  6. What is the extent of involvement of employees (top-down perspective) on these decisions in terms of the decision variables (inputs, criteria and other decision factors)?

If you see issues in any of these parameters, you are probably a candidate for revamp. For more details, contact us for a confidential discussion.

{Originally published in 2009. The link to the whitepaper is given here}

Information Handling and Management: How do you Fare?

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