Issue #186 | April 2, 2009 | by Andy Kowl

We wanted to understand Lean, Six Sigma and Kanban; and we have hired two different reporters to write a feature detailing the differences among them.

Neither writer could define one from the other successfully. These were both pros who write for respected trade media; and they tried valiantly. The best we could do is describe one while taking care not to repeat words in the description for another. Make them sound different through use of language, sling the jargon your way, and assume you "will buy it" since everyone seems to have accepted they are not identical.

But we found we could switch almost any sentence from one discipline, use it to describe the other discipline, and never actually be incorrect. (We welcome all volunteers to explain this; and we will share it here.)

The common fact is these concepts are all ways of viewing, and approaching, efficiencies of operation. Long live them all, no matter which approach is your favorite.

You will agree, I trust, right about now we could use less jargon and more action.

This week in Philadelphia I attended two side-by-side conferences, Info360, the AIIM Expo and the On Demand Conference. Here was a conjunction of communication technology based on content and information management – its collection, organization, storage, retrieval, sharing, security, delivery, its use online in social networks, blogs, email blasts and the distribute-and-print paradigm of variable data.

Everywhere you turned here was jargon, from EMC to ECM. Heck, even the name of one of the two conferences – AIIM – is so jargonish nothing in the press kit or the conference itself defined what that stands for. I asked an exhibitor, and he did not even know.

No matter the asset: tracking can add business value
Tracking information creation and processing is no less WIP than the creation of goods in a manufacturing environment. Tracking content assets – softer assets than those we tag with RFID – is keeping track of a range of assets of lesser, equal and/or greater value than assets that have surfaces we can place a tag on. Any way you look at it, it all goes back to lean organizational efficiencies.

Content and data can be as difficult to find sometimes as that skid of rotors that was misplaced last week. Tracking its usage, finding efficiencies, is also critical as it is in hard goods that must be processed through an operational environment.

How is it there is no bridge between the IT community tracking soft assets and the RFID community tracking hard assets?

In an article called "Building search teams that work" in Enterprise Search Sourcebook, Martin White writes, "Most business applications are built around processes and workflow. . . Ideally, all of the relevant information that the enterprise holds can be accessed. . . if a full-time search manager with the appropriate expertise cannot be allocated," White warns, "then the sensible route is to delay the implementation."

Doesn't this sound like what we wrote years ago about RFID here in Switchboard, "...strategically determine how current processes can be improved to become more efficient, faster, more accurate. . . To be successful in your use of this technology, be prepared to assign a full time person who 'owns' the results of your company's efforts."

It sounds like RFID is a couple years ahead of soft "Search"
If "Search" of soft assets is an industry that is maturing, how can the results not be better if you actually track the way things move within the business? Where workflows get stalled? Where time can be saved in material handling? How to reduce purchasing – not through algorithms but through knowing what is used and what is not?

By combining the actionable data that results from searching and tracking high value assets – people, printed documents, manufacturing processes, the ebb and flow of your company's goods, a more efficient allocation of vehicles, etc. – with their search for content assets, this leaves the realm of jargon and becomes real world.

Those in the RFID business should be reaching out to these "soft searchers" and combining forces. Their unique abilities will help the hard good trackers as well.

In this special edition published by a seemingly fine magazine called KM World, "Content, Document and Knowledge Management," they go on to describe a Search, or Information Discovery, Manager. (Now that Information Discovery job is one I have and endorse it wholeheartedly.) "This is not an IT role," White adds. "Instead, it requires a very good understanding of how information is used in the business, with a particular emphasis on unstructured information.

"The Search Manager might have a background in business intelligence applications, but the key success factor is that he or she understands the language of the business," the article asserts.

Or as we wrote here in the past, "Remember that RFID implementations are really about business process changes. . . It's true that IT infrastructure is involved; but fundamentally, RFID is about enabling business process change."

Just like in the asset tracking we have covered for years, there are security issues. In another KM World article on tracking soft assets, "Sure Results," Ron Miller writes, "While it is exciting that enterprise search tools continue to improve and provide expanding access to documents across a variety of content repositories, this level of access raises a serious security issue: how to prevent people from seeing documents they aren’t supposed to see."

As Rakesh Kumar writes on Switchboard, "RFID readers are network devices and, like all other devices on your corporate network, they need to be secured. Substitute the word 'reader' for 'router' and you get the idea. . . Readers provide critical information about corporate assets."

These two efforts, neither of which currently pays attention to the other, will both be far more successful by connecting with each other right now.


Next week, Part II: Business Process Management