That would create a Structure Capital. Holding the knowledge of how things works inside an Enterprise, that´s pretty powerful stuff, right? If you do this you can save a lot of money. Just imagine not starting every project with a process description exercise where you have to gather crucial staff in meeting rooms and once again try to explain to a group of consultants how your business is running. Instead the knowledge will be safely stored in a database, easily accessed whenever needed trough your ordinary web-publishing application. Whenever I introduce these thoughts, most people smile with the famous "Yeah-that-would-be-great-in-a-perfect-world-smile". It seems the thought is too far away to grab, too complex to implement, too expensive to be funded, too great to be true...
But it doesn´t have to be that far away. Just walk into your own kitchen. Open any cupboard or drawer. Everything is nicely stored in it´s designated places, clean and fresh, ready for the next project to kick-off. Maybe some of it are a bit dusty, probably because time has passed since your last visit. Let´s bake the way you bake at home. You start your project by selecting a nice recipe, invent your larder and refrigerator to check if you have all ingredienses according to the recipe. You lack three ingredienses, but after a short stop at the local store your back in business. You bring out som kitchen-war from a drawer, stir and kneads the ingredienses to a dough, places it in the owen, and a few minutes later the most amazing scents starts spreading in the kitchen.
So, no big deal? Well, try the same thing the way most companies run projects: First you gather everyone you think is good at baking and ask them if they have any cool recipes in mind. You get a few contradictory ingredienses, and three different ways of mixing them. Two people refuse to settle on which temperature the owen should have for best result. Somebody has a vague memory of a similar project, but it´s probably locked away in one of the cupboards. Oh, the baking-consultant has the key, but he is probably at another customer by now. Nobody have heard of him for 6 months and to tell you the truth he was a bit lazy anyway. To be sure you have a correct recipe you call the local bakery to get a quality check. It´s hard to hear what they say between the laughs, but you turn down an offer from them to buy the product. The prize sounds like a ripoff. Back to the kitchen, you don´t remember which cupboard is the larder, oh, that´s right, there is no single larder, since the last project never actually put their ingrediences back from their locked project-cupboard and neither did the last couple of ones before that.
You wonder why they´re all locked, but IT decided it´s a penetration-risk of some unfamiliar sort and people have actually lost things in the kitchen in other projects. So you end up going to the supermarket to buy ALL ingredienses. They were out of baking powder, so you bought yeast instead. Nobody will notice, there is probably no difference anyway, you think driving back in heavy traffic. You realize that this costed more than you planed and that you´re probably a bit late, but half an hour, and you´ll be ready for sure. Back in the kitchen, you realize that there is no kitchenware available. All pans are frozen due to an upcoming release next weekend, so they´re useless. Back in the car to the supermarket. You pass the bakery you called earlier, but resists the reflex and drives on. Back in the kitchen a lot poorer than in your wildest dreams, with new kitchenware and finally a dough. You realize that the owen doesn´t work. A quick call to the house-attendant makes you wanna scream. Due to cost-cut-requirements, he decided to import an owen from overseas. It was so much cheaper. The only problem was that it runs on a different current and higher voltage, so it won´t work. The yeast in the dough is slowly swelling, the dirty kitchen-ware is smiling in the sink and people are starting to wonder exactly on which afternoon coffee break you´re going to deliver your cake.
A significant amount has passed since you got the brilliant idea to bake for your collegues. We call it Structure Capital. The gathered knowledge about the company, stored in a repository with a common format and framework. We talk about this and alot of other things at our aDAM Talks. Visit the link down below and check out upcoming headlines and aDAM Talks.
