Yasar F. Jarrar

Knowledge management: learning for organisational experience

Both intellectual capital and the management of knowledge are strongly emerging themes in today’s organisational world. Many authors and practitioners note that the emerging patterns are that intellectual capital will replace natural resources, commodities, finance, technology and production processes as the key factor influencing competitive advantage. However, knowledge management (KM) is still in its infancy. Aims to identify the critical success factors and best practices of KM through analysing the experiences of several organisations. Starts by defining what is meant by “knowledge” and “knowledge management”, and overviews the methodology used for identifying best practices. The second part is concerned with presenting a systematic and critical review of the published experiences of 40 organisations in KM. The analysis examined the methodologies pursued, IT support used, structures employed, results achieved, and the perceived critical success factors. This analysis allowed the proposal of several “best practices” for successful KM, which are presented and discussed.

Best practice transfer for future competitiveness: A study of best practices

Benchmarking or best practice management is increasingly being recognized as a powerful performance improvement eVort for processes, business units, and for entire corporations. It is a catch-phrase among executives of learning organizations and those at the frontier of operational excellence. Well-run companies and market leaders alike cannot aVord to ignore this emerging discipline if they want to remain leaders in their respective markets. However, there are many issues that organizations are wrestling with when it comes to the eVective adoption and transfer of best practices. Some of these can be highlighted through the following statements:

Future trends in benchmarking for competitive advantage: A global survey

As the pace of change accelerates in the 21st Century as a result of technological opportunities, liberalization of world markets, demands for innovation, quality and speed, organizations have to readjust and realign their operations to counter all these challenges. The pace of change has increasingly forced organizations to be more outward looking, market oriented and knowledge driven. A useful tool that can help businesses build strong capabilities, ensure an inward flow of ideas and establish true competitive gaps is benchmarking. This paper presents the findings of a global survey, undertaken by the European Centre for Total Quality Management (UK), which was aimed at assessing the trends and future directions of benchmarking and the transfer of best practices. Overall, 227 organizations took part in the study. Participant organizations came from 32 different countries, all involved in benchmarking. The participants had a wide cross-section of organizational sectors, ranging from non-profit and government agencies to environmental management services and auto parts manufacturers. The survey shed light on current trends in benchmarking (its spread and the benefits achieved) and highlighted some issues that will affect its future, mainly the effects of information technology and globalization. These factors were seen as an opportunity rather than threat by most study participants. The paper provides an analysis of these results and provides recommended best practices for achieving competitive advantage through benchmarking in the future.

Business process re-engineering: Learning from organizational experience

Since the early 1990s, there has been an organizational race to implement business process re-engineering (BPR). Many BPR methodologies and variations have been proposed by both academicians and practitioners, but a close look at the concept of BPR emerged from observing the practices of highly successful organizations in the 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, to understand truly BPR one has to learn from the world of organizational experience. It is vital to look at what others have done, their feedback, mistakes, results and overall approach to re-engineering. This paper provides a critical review of 79 case studies from the re-engineering literature. It introduces a review of a wide spectrum of case studies, studying the various approaches, methodologies and tools applied to assess the applicability of BPR concepts universally, the applicability within different organizational types and sectors, the actual results achieved, and the critical success factors and major challenges from the viewpoint of practitio...

Employee empowerment – a UK survey of trends and best practices

It is becoming increasingly clear that the engine for organisational development is not analysts, but managers and people who do the work. Without altering human knowledge, skills, and behaviour, change in technology, processes, and structures is unlikely to yield long‐term benefits. Managing business productivity has essentially become synonymous with managing change effectively. To manage change, companies must not only determine what to do and how to do it, they also need to be concerned with how employees will react to it. In this respect, the role of human resource management (HRM) is moving from the traditional command and control approach to a more strategic one, and studies have highlighted “employee empowerment” as one of its critical success elements. Introduces a study that aimed at identifying the current trends and best practices in employee empowerment by analysing case studies of pioneering organisations and validating the findings through a survey of leading UK organisations. Presents the findings of this survey and provides comments and a conclusion about the future directions in “empowerment”.

Extracting value from data – the performance planning value chain

Focuses on the performance planning value chain (PPVC). The PPVC is the latest thinking in the field of Performance Measurement developed by the Centre for Business Performance, Cranfield School of Management. It provides a systemic process for using data to enhance decision‐making, bringing together a vast array of tools to extract value from data and focus efforts on what will add real value to the organisation.

Integrating total quality management and business process re-engineering: is it enough?

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, knowledge has accumulated, innovations have been occurring at an unprecedented rate, competition for technology and markets has intensi® ed, and customers have become more educated and more demanding than ever. This has forced organizations world-wide to set up new methods of dealing within the context of laws and standards that require a completely overhauled way of organizational thinking and behaviour. In 1998, a survey of the leading UK organizations was undertaken by the authors to assess the views and practices regarding future performance excellence. The survey revealed that 96.6% of senior managers who responded agreed that change has become the foremost business issue of our day. Eighty point three per cent of the respondents also agreed that success today requires a completely overhauled way of organizational thinking and behaviour. Clearly, businesses have realized that there is a need to restructure their business practices and become more customer-focused. However, they do not necessarily know how and what to change, to achieve improvements in productivity and performance (Love & Gunasekaran, 1997). In the last decade, two main organizational development models dominated the organizational world, namely, total quality management (TQM) and business process re-engineering (BPR). Organizations have used either or both to achieve the required change and ensure success.

Measuring organizational effectiveness in the NHS: Management style and structure best practices

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK has witnessed a plethora of changes during the last two decades and although a lot of work has been done in the area of clinical outcomes and effectiveness, very little has been undertaken in the area of managerial effectiveness. The European Centre for Total Quality Management has conducted a research project involving NHS Trusts throughout England and Wales to determine whether organizational effectiveness is a result of management processes, people, or a combination of both. The project included a survey of NHS Trusts based on a self-assessment questionnaire which assessed 10 key areas: strategic development, business planning, marketing and communications, interagency partnerships, performance management, financial management, corporate governance strategy, clinical effectiveness development, activity/demand management and corporate governance. An Organizational Effectiveness model was then developed to ‘audit’ the responses to the questionnaires and ‘drill down’ to best practices which produce improved performance. This paper presents the major findings of this research project, and discuss the best practices for performance excellence in the NHS Trusts in the specific areas of management style and structure.