The Real Intersection Between Processes and Content

The following link is to an article we were asked to write discussing relationships between business processes and content (hint: the answer's not workflow). This was published in the January 2009 issue of The Capital Image the monthly newsletter of the National Capital Chapter of AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management).

http://www.nccaiim.org/Newsletter/2009/2009_Jan_Issue.pdf

New Emergency Response Guide

Yesterday we announced the launch of an all web version of the Center for Disease Control's Emergency Response Guide for State, Local and Tribal Public Health Officials (that's a mouthful isn't it?). Here a link to the press release: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20090113005517/en

As much as an exercise to provide something of value (for free) to emergency response and preparedness professionals, it was also our intent to show that even something relatively mundane such as a procedural guide can still benefit from restructuring in the context of a process. In this case the process is ‘how to respond to a public health emergency’, but it might as well have been how to do… anything.

Point is a 65 page pdf of any procedure falls short in so many ways. It’s static, it is difficult to update, links to related content are limited and outdated and navigating the document is painful.

To register for the free version of the guide (there is a juiced up version as well), visit our site at: http://www.contextware.com/solution/emergency_response.html

Recession and knowledge management

Hate to say it, but we told you so. A lot of our clients and prospective clients have long fretted about the loss of talent as people reach retirement age. The point we've made to them time and again is that the decision to retire is often fluid...in the sense that a good stock market will accelerate retirement and a poor stock market will slow things down. And with the most recent debacle on Wall Street the later couldn't be any more true. Even the best laid retirement plans have been impacted by massive stock, bond and mutual fund losses.

Many of those same clients and prospects have delayed knowledge management efforts because workers had not been retiring quite as quickly as the workforce planning folks suggested they might (even before the recession)...and now they're off the hook considering the current economic environment.

But that entirely misses the point about knowledge capture and its potential impact on the business. People come and go, the wave of retirements is currently replaced by the wave of layoffs and RIFs. What institutional and job expertise is being lost and at what rate? Most importantly, as the economy improves and we start to rebuild our workforces...how much more quickly could new hires be brought up to speed, how much more could productivity be impacted and how much better positioned could your company be coming out of a downturn?

Happy New Year Indeed

After considerable cajoling on the part of clients, partners, a few well intended colleagues and a New Year’s resolution, welcome to Contextware’s new corporate blog. We’ll blog about company information, observations on technology in general and our markets in particular; feature the occasional guest blogger and the occasional rant. Above all, we’ll try to keep it pithy. So Happy New Year indeed.