Realize that we are Building an Information System that Includes Many People

• We need to realize that our organizations are really complex information systems composed of people, information tools/applications, computer systems and computer networks, and information in a variety of forms [MS Office Application and others].

• For our organizations to work more effectively, we need to start treating this complex information system as a whole and design it and/or improve it in the same manner that we build and maintain any other complex systems.

• In particular, we are currently wasting many hours of most peoples time because we are operating with information systems that are not able to facilitate people working together and sharing information in manners that enable our teams to get their jobs done effectively.

• Further, we are not capturing our information in a many that makes it readily available to the people that need it. In many cases, people are not aware of relevent information generated by other parts of the organization or work that was done at a prior time.

• Much of this is because most individuals do their work locally on their C: drive, then use hardcopies or e-mail when they need to disseminate their work to others. This is incredibly inefficient and wasteful of resources.

Take Advantage of What People Already Know and How They Work

• Most people are already familiar with MS Office Applications. They use these tools everyday to perform their work.

• Further, there is an extensive amount of existing information in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, and Project formats in most working environments.

• Many people are already familiar with Web Browsers from the standpoint of using them to access the WWW. However, few have experience with building web pages.

• Using Netscape Gold's Editor to build web pages is no more difficult than using Word to generate new documents. It can be done by anyone in the organization from Secretaries to Engineers to Senior Management.

Build an Information Infrastructure that Facilitates Working Together

• Determine what information people use and generate on a day to day basis; how they get access to and use that information; and what processes they use to generate new information.

• Determine what information needs to be shared between which individuals to facilitate their working effectively within the various teams of the organization.

• Make people aware of what information is available and ensure that they can easily get to the latest versions of information along with any older versions that may be needed for historical reasons.

• Identify what information impacts multiple teams and ensure that interfaces are created to share whatever information is needed to effectively accomplish the organizations mission.

• Educate everyone to increase their awareness of how there tasks on the team(s) they support relate to other tasks of their team and other teams. This larger picture will permit everyone to do their part to make sure appropriate connections are made within the overall information system that constitutes the organization.

Capture as Much Expertise as Possible in the Information Infrastructure

• The more we are able to capture richly connected information in our infrastructures, the less reliant the organization will be on the specific expertise of individuals.

• Our goal should be to ensure that as much of our collective expertise as possible is captured in our data structures ... and whatever cannot be so captured is distributed to others within the organization. While it is not possible to replicate everyone, each function that any of our individuals perform should be able to be done by some combination of others perhaps not as well, but to at least an acceptable level of performance.

• This requires not only capturing the information environment used by each person, but also their AFSCN system knowledge, general systems engineering process knowledge, and understanding of how to perform various specific integration related tasks.

• Another very important part of this is techniques for getting people to work effective as teams. We need to make sure we capture what works and what doesn't work in our lessons learned and that we continuously evolve and improve both our processes and the information infrastructure that support us in getting the job done.

• This should be something that everyone is responsible for on a part time basis. It should also be something that a core group of systems engineers and information specialists are responsible for on a full time basis in support of the entire organization. Without this core group, we are forced to rely on ad hoc means for achieving such improvements. This is insufficient to get the job done right. Our complex information system that constitutes our organization requires the same level of development and maintenance attention that we give to any other complex system.

• The bottom line is that we cannot allow any single points of failure in our organization that result in a substantial degradation in performance of tasks that support our mission should we lose that person.