What Management Tools Are You Using?
The biannual Bain & Company's Management Tools and Trends 2007 survey is out, and I was surprised by a few results. The survey asks executives around the world to comment on several questions and then assesses their usage of and satisfaction with particular tools. The tools are mostly tried-and-true management ideas, but the survey provides an opportunity to check on how particular ideas are faring.
Some findings are not surprising. Managers say that corporate culture is important! Strategic planning is a valuable management tool! Stop the presses!
It’s the persistence of some management ideas once presumed dead that is surprising in this year’s survey. Specifically, reengineering and knowledge management, two ideas close to my own heart, finished in the top ten of management tools that global organizations use. Gary Hamel, for example, had proclaimed reengineering irrelevant more than a decade ago, and several pundits had written off knowledge management too. Yet they’re alive and kicking. Granted, knowledge management has problems in the survey with satisfaction levels, but people keep coming back for more of it.
The survey doesn’t really tell us much about exactly how people are using these tools, however, and I have major questions about both reengineering and knowledge management. On the reengineering front, I am pretty confident that not too many people are actually using the slash-and-burn, blow-it-up school of reengineering as popularized by Mike Hammer. I presume that what they are doing is a more moderate form of process redesign. The survey also includes Six Sigma and Lean Operations, but reengineering was more likely to be used than either of them. One obvious conclusion is that there are too many tools for accomplishing process management; I have long argued that we should combine all of these different religious sects and just call it process management.
The world of knowledge management is clearly changing too, but the survey doesn’t tell us how. Despite my aforementioned reservations in this blog/discussion about Enterprise 2.0, I do believe that more participative and emergent versions of knowledge management are starting to appear. The old idea of creating repositories in advance of every possible need just didn’t work. I am guessing that the “knowledge management” that tied for 8th in the Bain survey is some combination of the top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up approaches. What do you think? And what are your reactions to the Bain survey results?
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Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the 
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I was interested in their general comment about the higher important of "softer" management tools such as culture or knowledge management along with "harder" tools such as Balanced Scorecard metrics.
I was also interested in the new tools they added - blogging and consumer ethnography.
- Posted by Lauchlan Mackinnon
April 24, 2007 21:24
So as a management tool beauty pageant I find this useful - and that's not meant to be disparaging, just to recognise the limitations of surveys.
Some comments on Knowledge Management:
- KM is protean. With BSC, you can point to an example of a BSC. With KM, people could be pointing to an intranet, a database, a lessons learned program, a CoP effort, an intellectual capital report, etc.
- KM is notoriously hard to measure impact-wise. Often it does not involve customers & it may not directly impact the executive suite much (unlike,say, M&A). Hence its perceived value is lower (excepting the KM programs that are rubbish).
- Those making in a major KM implementation were more satisfed than those making a limited implementation. In fact KM ranked 7th in the difference between those 2 scores.
- Pharma & Healthcare are the heaviest users but Services & Finance seem to be the most satisfied. I don't really know what that means - except that services businesses actually sell their knowledge (rather than a product incorporating it) so see the value more immediately.
- KM was used more heavily in Asia & had lower satisfaction among large corporations. So if you are a small Asia company, you are probably using KM & maybe even getting value from it.
Just as with BPR, I wonder if the KM programs of 2006 are the same as the programs from 2006? I hope not...
- Posted by Matt Moore
April 30, 2007 00:58
Nice close reading of the data, Matt. I agree that KM is protean--perhaps more so than some of the other management tools in the survey. With so much change in the concepts going on, a survey is perhaps not the best possible tool to find out what's really going on in the management tool world.
I don't see much traditional KM in finance, but it seems very well-established in professional services firms.
- Posted by Tom Davenport
May 1, 2007 21:01