Knowledge Matters™

A colleague has completed an analysis, using my RAAKERS™ framework, of two organisations which are located on different continents from the parent organisation. The results are very interesting. Just to refresh your memory RAAKERS™ is an acronym for responsibility, authority, accountability, knowledge, experience, resources and systems. RAAKERS™ is a risk and knowledge management framework to assess where an organisation’s weaknesses might be. Consider the graph below.

The dark green bars are the possible scores for RAAKERS™ components in this order – responsibility, authority, accountability, knowledge, experience, resources and systems. The coloured bars indicate the strength of the component. Red bars are a score of less than four. Orange bars are a score between four and nine. Light green bars are a score greater than nine. ...

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Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because I am actually not so sure about their utility, and would welcome any feedback you might have. That said I do feel they elicit interesting management questions.

Consider the network diagram below. For a change it’s a different organisation to the one we have been looking at in previous blog-posts , but I have applied the same principles. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be critically dependent on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit. This organisation assigns risk to six categories, which are shown as the red squares. The categories are real things in the real world rather than budget and schedule. ...

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Today I thought I would share with you HolisTech®'s Regulatory Risk Cube. In 2003 Patrick Byrne and I completed an assignment with the Royal Australian Navy. We were helping the Navy to design a regulatory framework. As part of the assignment we ran several workshops with ten diverse organisations, including the Australian Antarctic Division, the Australian Council of Healthcare Standards, and the Civil Aviation Authority. The workshops were interesting because the participants were benchmarking themselves against each other, and each expected the others’ system would be the same or very similar - in fact they were very different. The challenge was to develop a generic regulatory framework that encompassed all approaches. One of the outcomes from the workshops was the Regulatory Risk Cube, which is depicted below.

The cube has three axes. The x-axis shows the impact of the adverse event. The y-axis shows the chance of an adverse happening with high-risk at the top of the axis. The z-axis shows the risk being considered against system maturity from high/low to low/high depending on the circumstance. ...

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The Knowledge Level of Maturity (KLOM) - A Knowledge Approach to Identifying Risk in Projects . This paper was presented at the 19th IPMA World Congress in India in November 2005.

A Strategic Risk Based Approach to Regulating Technologies and Vulnerabilities . This paper was co-authored with Patrick Byrne and presented at the 2007 International Symposium on Technology and Society in June 2007. It will be published by The Society on Social Implications of Technology as conference proceedings. This link takes you to the complete bibliography .

Everything has both intended and unintended consequences. The intended consequences may or may not happen: the unintended consequences always do!

Dee Hock