Course Summaries (43)
KCI provides applied management and professional development education in several disciplines. The extensive portfolio of seminars addresses a variety of business interests and needs. We provide various seminars and courses for public and in-house training. These courses are focused on contemporary topics, issues, and skills needed by many organizations. Our courses are designed to provide a broad understanding and clear application focus for all participants.
Scorecard approaches have received considerable attention as a means to assess both operational and strategic performance of an organization. The balanced scorecard approach has had very good reception and success in assisting management with a way to improve the value to shareholders through an organized view of measures in the enterprise. Further, the approach connects in a logical manner to the strategic needs and direction of the enterprise. Understanding strategic impact is a key to the successful use of scorecards.
This course includes some background on various scorecard approaches used in the past and present. The balanced scorecard approach is covered in considerable detail as the current scorecarding technique to gain widespread use and global success. Finally, the economy is changing in many ways and the balanced scorecard approach must change with it to be relevant. This course also introduces the attendee to the potential changes that may happen in the very near future.
The key difference in this course and others on balanced scorecard is that there are sample workshop type implementations using Excel and other tools to indicate the issues in the use and automation of scorecard capabilities and constructing simple scorecard dashboards.
Duration: 4 days
Strategy Today, mapping the future for your enterprise has more options than ever. The interest in better disciplines of management and their related quantitative and descriptive analysis methods gives management a wide variety of tools for achieving peak performance. Gathering these disciplines and methods together through the concept of strategic enterprise management, abbreviated SEM, provides the framework for dealing with the turmoil of how to manage, what to manage and what to focus on in the enterprise to get results.
This course provides participants the basic tools necessary to assess, plan and implement a knowledge management capability in an enterprise. The techniques described in the course are useful for bridging the gap between expectations and reality, providing a means to leverage existing knowledge efforts and increase value by focusing the efforts on projects with quick payback. Tools and technology considerations provide an opportunity for IT excellence in the management and delivery of knowledge to users.
Duration: 3 days
Description:
Managers today are struggling with the ideas of knowledge management, the value of knowledge management and how to achieve effective knowledge transfer. Being able to effectively direct and manage the knowledge effort requires at least a basic understanding of the approach, concept and issues with implementing a knowledge strategy. A core idea to knowledge management at this time is the use of the learning organization to evaluate and leverage the knowledge in an enterprise.
The ideas of knowledge repository and knowledge processes need exploration as well as knowledge process outsourcing. Here the value lies as well as who can benefit from the knowledge asset is also important. With these ideas a manager can prepare an effective knowledge management plan with proper business justification of the knowledge effort and a means of tracking results.
Many managers in an organization can benefit from this course if only to give some appreciation of the value of their knowledge in their organizations and how that knowledge fits with the rest of the enterprise.
Duration: 2 days
Description:
Efficient and effective delivery and use of knowledge increases the range of available business solutions, uncovers hidden business strengths, represents an opportunity for value-added supplier relations and brings a working meaning to the idea of intellectual capital. Whether thinking in terms of documents, ideas, or actions, a simple and efficient method of capturing, locating, articulating, using and managing knowledge in the enterprise is needed. In simple terms, good knowledge management promotes better business performance.
There are many interpretations of knowledge management today. Some interpretations are very basic viewing knowledge management as document management with a twist and others are more general such as the intellectual capital concept. Each interpretation has some value and benefit to the business. This course presents knowledge and knowledge management in context of business need and value by relating knowledge management directly to work performed.
This course provides participants the basic tools necessary to assess and plan for a knowledge management capability in an enterprise. The techniques described in the course are useful for bridging the gap between expectations and reality, providing a means to leverage existing knowledge efforts and increase value by focusing the efforts on projects with quick payback. Tools and technology considerations provide an opportunity for IT excellence in the management and delivery of knowledge to users.
Duration: 3 days
Enterprise governance of any organization depends on establishing a well defined and clear set of policies and procedures ( P & P ). Whether starting from an existing set of policies and procedures or developing a completely new set, it is important to understand what makes the policies and procedures successful. Success depends on knowing what the busi-ness needs and defining a set of policies and procedures that meets that need.
This seminar presents several different perspectives and components of documenting policies, procedures and processes in the enterprise. This seminar brings together two key perspectives on policies and procedures. The first perspective is achieving an understanding of how to determine what is needed. The second key perspective is knowing how to convert the needs into an active and viable set of policies and procedures. Key techniques are used such as:
- Policies and procedures assessments.
- Aligning P & P with the needs.
- Measuring the performance of P & P
- Identifying best practices.
- Identifying the relationship of policies, procedures and processes.
You can expect to learn the following:
- Identify and define the basic alignment of policies and procedures with the needs of the business.
- Assess the current situation with respect to the useful-ness and applicability of existing policies and procedures.
- Design a policy and procedure structure.
- Write policies and procedures.
- Determine best practices for a policies and procedures infrastructure, formats and goals.
- Identify and use sources of policies and procedures content.
- Prepare plans for and manage the deployment of a policies and procedures system in part or as a whole system.
Duration: 4 days
Organization performance is directly related to the execution the key processes of the enterprise by front line workers. Deploying policies and procedures P & P is critical to the proper execution of workflows and process flows by the enterprise workforce. It is not enough to document the policies and procedures. Managing them and keep-ing them updated, current, complete and relevant assures efficient and effective process perfor-mance. To do this a quality P & P system is needed. This seminar presents several different perspectives and components of documenting policies, procedures and processes in the enterprise. The key questions in designing and deploying a P & P system are answered.
What might you expect to learn from this course:
- Explain and use the policy and procedure life cycle.
- Document a policy and procedure deployment plan.
- Define the requirements for a P & P system along with the need for new ways of looking at policies and procedures.
- Demonstrate how to integrate P & P into processes and workflows.
- Select and recommending an appropriate tool suite for policies and procedures.
- Decompose policies and procedures into pieces of content for use with on line P&P system and integration into workflows.
- Extract a process from an existing procedure and reorganize the procedure into one of the newer formats.
- Analyze and assess the impact of changes in the policies and procedures on the organization.
- Explain and use the touchpoints of the P & P to estimate risk and difficulty in changing policies and procedures.
- Define a structure for organizing P & P that is easy to use and meaningful to the organization.
- Confirm that policies and procedures are being complied with by the organization.
Duration: 4 days
Business integration is a key task in achieving the efficiency and effectiveness to meet strategic objectives. The purpose of the integration is always to achieve an improvement in enterprise performance either current or expected. The analysis used for integration can validate current performance or identify the best approach to doing the integration. It is the expected performance of operations that presents a great opportunity. Many organizational changes such as mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, divestitures, privatizations etc. fail due to differences in operations, culture and difficulty in integrating or separating the operations. In fact sources report as many as 75% of mergers and acquisitions (as well as consolidations) fail in some manner integration difficulties with the various business components.
Business integration is the combination of the enterprise into larger parts or separation of an enterprise into smaller or separate parts. It is a change in the structure of the enterprise. The need for integration derives from the actions of the management to restructuring the enterprise as a response to business environmental pressures mostly after the actions of competitors or economic pressures. As such it is needed by all type of enterprises not just for profit businesses. Enterprise integration might involve centralization or decentralization, merger, acquisition, divestiture, privatization, consolidation and other structural changes.
Even if you are not considering a structural integration type of change in the business you often want to know if your operational expectations can be met. Also you want to know if you made an integration decision can you expect it be executed effectively and efficiently. So, if you are considering a major change such as consolidation it is important to know if the operations can support the expectations.
Whether you are a business, a government body, educational institution or other structure, the result of such an analysis as with the quantitative and financial numbers provides you with a more complete situation assessment and reduces the risk of change. In this course the techniques of integration analysis and application are explored and applied with the emphasis on operational and cultural assessment.
Duration: 4 days
Business excellence today means more than just process improvement or having a good quality program. It means having the capability and the skills to analyze various aspects of business performance and apply the appropriate actions for solution. The data to perform such analysis is more available.
Gain insight into issues involving risk, sensitivity, influence, decision making and patterns of performance. Learn new techniques including Neural nets, decision trees, semantic analysis, cyber metrics, now than at any other time in history. Coupled with the availability of data is the emergence of a variety of analytical techniques and methods designed to focus on remediation of problems, decisions or situations of Inter-est to the business. Analytic techniques have evolved to solve certain typesof business problems.
Deciding between alternatives requires some form of decision analysis while ranking risk requires a method of quantifying and then ranking the risk. Even basic 4 –box techniques require thought and insight into their meaning and Interpretation. The methods and concepts needed to make these ideas definitive are discussed in detail. In this course, you will learn how to:
- Apply basic statistical techniques to business problems and identify the appropriate solution
- Select the best statistical techniques for a particular business problem
- Use correlation approaches on time series data to identify factors that move together for prediction
- Use regression analysis for prediction and trend extrapolation of time series data such as financial and quantitative factors
- Apply decision trees to situations that require evaluation and determination of alternatives such for internal investment opportunities
- Use basic formulas to assess best use of resources to maximize volume and profits or minimize cost and resources
- Use influence diagrams to identify and quantify the factors that influence key performance and key results indicators
- Apply semantic key word ranking techniques to identify common words in customer complaints and help inquiries
- Use basic techniques for converting ‘soft’ ranking such as high, medium and low into quantitative values.
Duration: 5 days
The understanding of any enterprise and the basis for many decisions revolves around a basic understanding of the data involved. The acquisition, analysis, aggregation, presentation and interpretation of data are crucial to the effective and efficient running of the enterprise.
Whether the purpose is operational performance, enterprise performance, financial analysis, competitive analysis, strategic direction setting or data for outside decision making of partners and customers the delivery of that data links the success of the business with the management. Understanding the basis and impact of decisions is crucial to improving enterprise performance. You will have the opportunity to learn:
- Apply statistical techniques in a constructive manner to improve operational understanding
- Illustrate the relationship between decisions and data
- Interpret how data analysis and business performance are related through measures
- Design methods that analyze operational performance
- Demonstrate how to use data to help understand and manage the business on a strategic level
- Use that data to compare yourself to competitors and other companies
- Define how uncertainty can be incorporated into decisions
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When analyzing an enterprise it is sometimes useful to divide the project into several small projects to control cost, minimize risk and train staff. Functional architectures are one technique to do this. The architecture of the enterprise can be developed one function at a time and integrated together. In some situations all that may be needed is an architecture of part of the enterprise. This is often the case when a structural decision is being made about the enterprise such as separating out a function for outsourcing or federating it. Other times part of the enterprise may be a candidate for sale or integrating into another part of the organization. In such cases a complete architecture of the enterprise may not be needed and would represent overkill.
This course presents a practical incremental approach to doing architecture function by function. The technique of architecture integrations is described and analytics are discussed for comparative analysis. Comparative analysis of architecture structures supports decision making on organizational options
Duration: 4 days
In any architecture project there are many artifacts such as documents and diagrams that are developed. These diagrams might be matrices of relationships, flow diagrams, decompositions of processes, data structures, organizations, locations or any other component of the enterprise. There are a large number of these artifacts numbering often in the thousands. They are expensive to generate and should be reused as much as possible. These artifacts should be managed in one place as an asset for the enterprise.
This course presents an approach to the management of architecture pieces, the artifacts that result from an architecture project. If they are kept in one place it is much easier to do added analysis when new artifacts are developed. No one tool does everything for architecture. A tool suite is needed. Tools are suggested that work together to help manage the artifacts.
Duration: 4 days
IT architecture is perhaps the most common architecture developed today. The reasons for this are simple. Many of the architecture techniques have been developed by IT to cope with the explosive growth of the use of digital technology, the large cost of digitization, the complicated structure of enterprises and the rapidly changing structures that are needed to respond to market changes and economic impacts.
This course presents current core concepts in IT architecture. Methodologies such as TOGAF are discussed and frameworks such as the Zachman framework are covered. Linkages into the business architecture are described. The course also utilizes an extensive use of semantic analytics to validate, certify and perform comparative analysis of architectures.
Duration: 4 days
It is not enough to know the market and the products that are offered in the market. It has become important to know the architecture of the products and services offered by the enterprise. Product and service architectures have a structure that can be analyzed for efficiencies and opportunities, such as: clustering parts of a product or service into platforms. These platforms are then supported by the process architecture.
This course presents a methodology, artifacts and possible tools for developing and analyzing product, service and process architectures. Specific techniques of semantic analysis are used to compare and contrast the architectures, determine where common points are and identify opportunities for consolidation into platforms or separation into individual product lines. Further the techniques can be used for comparing and contrasting structures for potential mergers, acquisition or consolidations.