At APQC we often discuss the benefits of process management (PM) and knowledge management (KM). From our perspective, the two disciplines are intricately intertwined. After all, processes require the knowledge and experience of an organization’s employees to be successful and knowledge management is most successful when it aligns with and supports the business of the organization, which often is represented in its core business processes.
The interactions between the enterprise PM and KM groups often remind me of the old Reese’s® Peanut Butter Cup commercials from the 1980s. In the ad, a woman walks down the street enjoying her peanut butter while a man walks down the street noshing on a chocolate bar. They bump into each other, and exclaim “Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate! Or “Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” They each then eat their treats and proclaim, “Delicious!” KM is like peanut butter (‘cause it’s sticky! Get it?), and process is like chocolate. Mix them together and not only is it delicious, but it can bring about some amazing results.
Achieving those results has been troublesome for many organizations. Internal processes typically are patched together, especially cross-functional processes, and they can be troublesome to maintain. And the content assets (e.g., project flows, process maps, job aids, design specs, etc.) needed to support those processes tend to be stored in multiple locations and may not be the authoritative version. But what if it could be easier? What if integrating process management and knowledge management was really simple? What if there was a solution that could help incorporate performance measurement, knowledge management, and best practices with our processes?
APQC has developed such a solution. It’s called MosaiQTM, and it aims to change how you interact with your business. MosaiQ is a platform that helps organizations better measure, manage, and learn about business process. It does this by integrating the key experiences in each of these domains into a single delicious and elegant whole.
The image below captures a screenshot of MosaiQ that illustrates what this integration could look like. On the left is the process while on the right are some content assets related to that process. There are also places to incorporate best practices and performance measures to support the process. And supporting all of this is a discussion area where people ask and answer questions, collaborate, and share their knowledge related to the process and its content assets.
MosaiQ Snapshot
Imagine a world where you no longer have to jump around from a web site to a team site to a shared drive to find the information you need! Not only will MosaiQ enable organizations to organize their processes and manage the content associated with them, but it will also help them to manage the measures and find best practices related to the processes. The solution links to APQC’s Knowledge Base and allows process groups to identify and link best practices to their processes to improve them. It also connects with APQC’s Benchmarking Portal to find and link metrics to their processes to monitor their performance.
Process management and knowledge management—two great disciplines that are awesome together!
MosaiQ will be available to APQC members in March 2016. For more information on MosaiQ, email [email protected].