Task: Read the case study very carefully. Your task will be to answer all the questions in detail. Please be descriptive in your answers. All the same, try to make them to-the-point and succinct.
Problem 1. What are the business goals of SFPUC? How is knowledge management related to those goals?
Problem 2. What were some of the challenges faced by SFPUC? What management, organization, and technology factors were responsible for those challenges?
Problem 3. Describe how implementing EPC improved knowledge management and operational effectiveness at SFPUC.
Problem 4 .How effective was EPC as a solution for SFPUC?
CASE STUDY:
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Preserves Expertise with Better Knowledge Management
A major challenge facing many companies and organizations is the imminent retirement of baby boomers. For certain organizations, this challenge is more daunting than usual, not only because of a larger spike in employee retirements, but also because of the business process change that must accompany significant shifts in any workforce. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) was one such organization. SFPUC is a department of the city and county of San Francisco that provides water, wastewater, and municipal power services to the city. SFPUC has four major divisions: Regional Water, Local Water, Power, and Wastewater (collection, treatment, and disposal of water). The organization has over 2,000 employees and serves 2.4 million customers in San Francisco and the Bay Area. It is the third largest municipal utility in California. SFPUC's Power division provides electricity to the city and county of San Francisco, including power used to operate electric streetcars and buses; the Regional and Local Water departments supply some of the purest drinking water in the world to San Francisco and neighboring Santa Clara and San Mateo counties; and the Wastewater division handles flushed and drained water to significantly reduce pollution in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. The mission of this organization is to provide San Francisco and its Bay Area customers with reliable, high-quality, affordable water and wastewater treatment while efficiently and responsibly managing human, physical, and natural resources. SFPUC expected that a significant portion of its employees--about 20 percent--would retire in 2009. To make matters worse, the majority of these positions were technical, which meant that the training of new employees would be more complicated, and maintaining knowledge of the retiring workers would be critical to all areas of SFPUC's business processes. To deal with this trend, companies and organizations like SFPUC must rearrange their operations so that the generational swap doesn't adversely affect their operational capability in the upcoming decades. In particular, the organization needed a areas of SFPUC's business processes. To deal with this trend, companies and organizations like SFPUC must rearrange their operations so that the generational swap doesn't adversely affect their operational capability in the upcoming decades. In particular, the organization needed a way to capture the knowledge of its retiring employees of "baby boom" age in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and then communicate this knowledge successfully to the next generation of employees. The two major challenges SFPUC faced were successfully capturing, managing, and transferring this knowledge, and maintaining reliability and accountability despite a large influx of new workers. SFPUC met these challenges by implementing a business process management (BPM) and workflow solution from Interfacing Technologies Corporation to drive change efforts across the organization. The system, called Enterprise Process Center, or EPC, manages knowledge retention and establishes new ways of collaborating, sharing information, and defining roles and responsibilities. SFPUC saw the retirement of its baby boomers as an opportunity to implement a structure that would alleviate similar problems in the future. With EPC, SFPUC would be able to maintain continuity from older to newer employees more easily. SFPUC was impressed that the system would span all four of its major divisions, helping to standardize common processes across multiple departments, and that it would be easy to use and train employees. EPC sought to identify common processes, called "work crossovers," by mapping business processes across each department. EPC is unique among BPM software providers in its visual representation of these processes. Using flow charts accessible via a Web portal to clearly depict the functions performed by each department, SFPUC was able to identify redundant and inefficient tasks performed by multiple departments. This visually oriented solution for optimizing business processes catered to both technology- savvy new employees and older baby boomers. Prior to the BPM overhaul, SFPUC employees had little incentive to share business process information. New environmental regulations were difficult to communicate. Certain inspection processes were conducted on an irregular basis, sometimes as infrequently as every 5 to 15 years. The knowledge required to execute these processes was especially valuable, because newer employees would have no way of completing these tasks without proper documentation and process knowledge. SFPUC needed ways to easily find knowledge about processes that were performed daily, as well as every 15 years, and what's more, that knowledge had to be up to date so that employees didn't stumble across obsolete information. EPC solved that problem by creating work order flows for all tasks performed within the organization, defining the employee roles and responsibilities for each. For example, the work order flow for SFPUC's wastewater enterprise displayed each step in the process visually, with links to manuals describing how to complete the task and the documents required to complete it. EPC also identified obsolete processes that were well suited to automation or totally superfluous. Automating and eliminating outdated tasks alleviated some of SFPUC's budget and workload concerns, allowing the organization to divert extra resources to training and human resources. SFPUC management had anticipated that eliminating outdated tasks would have the added effect of keeping employees happy, which would help SFPUC's performance by delaying retirement of older employees and increasing the likelihood that newer hires stayed at the company. EPC allowed employees to provide feedback on various tasks, helping to identify tasks that were most widely disliked. For example, the process for reimbursement of travel expenses was described as lengthy, highly labor-intensive, and valueless to the citizens of San Francisco. To be reimbursed for travel expenses, employees had to print a form, complete it by hand, attach travel receipts, and walk the documents over to their supervisors, who then had to manually review and approve each item and remit expenses for three additional levels of approval. Only then could the division controller issue the reimbursement. To address this need for sharing information and making documents available across the organization, SFPUC started by using a wiki, but the documents lacked different levels of relevance. Critical information pertaining to everyday tasks took the same amount of time to find as information pertaining to an inspection performed every 15 years. EPC allowed users to assign levels of relevance to tasks and identify critical information so that critical information displays when employees search for certain items. For example, SFPUC employees must comply with various regulatory permits for water and air quality standards. Lack of awareness of these standards often leads to unintentional violations. The BPM tool helped users assign risks to various tasks so that when employees queried information, the relevant regulations displayed along with the requested documents. Identifying the experts on particular subjects for mission-critical processes is often challenging when compiling information on business processes across the enterprise. SFPUC anticipated this, using EPC to break down large-scale process knowledge into more manageable pieces, which allowed more users to contribute information. Users were reluctant to buy in to the BPM implementation at first, but management characterized the upgrade in a way that invited employees to share their thoughts about their least favorite processes and contribute their knowledge. The final product of the knowledge management overhaul took the form of a "centralized electronic knowledge base," which graphically displays critical steps of each task and uses videos to gather information and show work being done. New employees quickly became confident that they could perform certain tasks because of these videos. The overall results of the project were overwhelmingly positive. EPC helped SFPUC take its baby boomers' individual data and knowledge and turn them into usable and actionable information that was easily shared throughout the firm. SFPUC stayed much further under budget than other comparable governmental organizations. SFPUC's new knowledge processes made many activities more paperless, reducing printing costs, time to distribute documents, and space required for document retention. Going paperless also sup- ported the organization's mission to become more environmentally responsible. The addition of video technology to the process maps helped employees see how they could reduce energy consumption practices and electrical costs. By automating and redesigning the unwieldy travel reimbursement process described earlier, SFPUC reduced the time to process employee reimbursement requests by as much as 50 percent.