The survey

The survey was run over 3 weeks during September and October at KnowledgeBoard, a respected knowledge community web based forum. The survey was advertised on the KnowledgeBoard website on this page and also via email to the SPICE 2004 attendees, and other known process assessment community participants.
The survey gathered 124 responses.

The response data was cleaned.

This consisted of:

• Ensuring that only attributable responses were used (respondents who voluntarily provided email addresses). Each person was emailed to check for a valid email address and to agree to his or her input


• All responses without email addresses or invalid email addresses were eliminated


• 4 email responses provided ‘out of office’ replies. The results were checked separately to the other responses and found to be consistent, so were included in the overall analysis


• Checking and eliminating double responses (2 people were asked to select their preferred response between similar but not the same responses)


• Obviously false data patterns (e.g. all 1 response answer or an escalating pattern response) were eliminated.
  After data cleaning, there were 105 valid responses. These responses represent over 100 different organisations (there were a couple of respondents from the same organisation). In a couple of questions, there were no responses, so the number of responses varies between 103 and 105. The questions mostly used a five-point ordinal scale, except for 2 questions that used a six-point scale. While the data used for analysis represents attributable data from the respondents, the usual caveats for this type of survey apply.


• Firstly, the data sample size, while significant, is still a small data set that may be entirely representative of the communities covered.


• Secondly, as response was voluntary, the data may be biased towards organisations and people who may show more interest in the surveyed areas than normal. This may skew the results (more of less favourable), although data analysis has not indicated any particular bias.


• Thirdly, many of the questions elicit people’s opinions rather than independently verifiable facts. This is typical of cultural issue surveys, but needs to be understood when considering the results.


• Finally the author may have unintentionally introduced some bias into the questions asked and the response categories. Data analysis does not indicate any such bias but this does not mean it can be eliminated as a consideration.

The survey questions

The survey questions included some questions that attempted to cross correlate the same issue while not totally redundant. There were also some explicit cultural dimension questions (e.g. organisational hierarchy, decision making, gaining management support).

• 1. How important are knowledge workers to the success of the organisation?


• 2. How important are process specialists to the success of the organisation


• 3. Is the organisation vision and mission lived by people or more remote?


• 4. To what extent are employees informed about overall business objectives and processes, running projects and their results?


• 5. How easily accessible is this information?


• 6. To what extent are employees informed about innovation and improvement?


• 7. How easily accessible is this information?


• 8. Are there any forms of informal communication (peer to peer communication)?


• 9. Is improvement-focused conduct promoted / supported / rewarded?


• 10. How would you rate the commitment and active participation of personnel doing the work (for example, software practitioners, service staff) in defining and improving practices?


• 11. How would you rate the need for process specialists in helping to define and improve practices?


• 12. How important is process-related training of the employees in your company?


• 13. How would you see the approach to process improvement in your company: is it focused on individuals or teams to proceed?


• 14. Is innovative behaviour promoted/supported/rewarded?


• 15. Is risk of failure recognised and tolerated as part of innovative behaviour?


• 16. Are innovations directed from management or can they be proposed and developed by people at all levels of their organisation?


• 17. Does the organisation look outside for new knowledge, improvements or innovations to learn and use?


• 18. Do processes within your organisation work for or against innovation?


• 19. How easy is it to gain resources, support and privileges from management for improvement or innovative activities?


• 20. Are there activities in order to improve the capabilities of employees, for example through training, job rotation (personal development)?


• 21. How would you rate hierarchy in the organisation?


• 22. How would you rate the decision-making approach in your organisation?


• 23. Why are people rewarded?


• 24. How are people rewarded?


• 25. How would you describe your organisation?

Results

Putting all of the results with the graphs online here is not possible as we would have to make the images too small for readability (or break the website templates). Thus we present a short taster here, and the full results on the Starsweb website.

For the full initial survey results and graphs, go to:
The Starsweb results pages.

If you wish to receive the results as a .pdf, please contact Han Van Loon via email: mailto:hvl@synspace.com

The survey results shown here are the first preliminary collation and analysis. Further analysis is planned, in some case this is indicated in the report.

The organisational business covered a wide area of endeavour as shown in the following figure.

The main business areas were education, and Information Technology and software development. Both these areas are knowledge intensive, so they tend to reflect in part both the KnowledgeBoard community and the SPICE community. The other significant business sectors were aerospace, automotive, banking, manufacturing and public administration.

Respondents were also asked to categorise their organisation. The largest group were service providers but significant other organisation types were covered. Comparing the two above data sets indicates that a significant number of service providers are providing education services (since the number of academic institutions is limited). The respondents also covered a wide variety of roles and positions.

Middle managers make up the main group, followed by quality and process specialists (several of whom come from the SPICE community) and then Managing Directors/CEOs and researchers. Of the large response from organisations involved in Information Technology/Software as their main business (22 responses), very few are actual developers (only 3) or Chief Technology/Chief Information Officers (only 3). It would suggest that most respondents in this business area have middle management roles, or the quality and process specialist roles. This will be analysed further in the future.

The first set of questions were focussed on the importance of people, first Knowledge Workers, secondly process specialists.

The profile for the importance of knowledge workers had over 60% of respondents indicating that knowledge workers were extremely important, and 33% as important.

The results reflect the expectation of the communities that were surveyed and the era of the knowledge society. The majority of organisations were in business areas where knowledge is very important (e.g. education, Information Technology, software, aerospace) and also reflect the types of organisation (where only 9% were industrial mass producers).

The results for process specialists were lower – a one-to-one comparison showed a mean difference of 0.58 between the levels of importance with a 0.24 variance within the 99% confidence limits. 77% of respondents stated that process specialists were important or extremely important, and the 14% rated as medium are based upon the statement that they use standard operating procedures. This indicates that 91% of organisation surveyed use some form of standard processes.

Conclusions

In this preliminary results presentation, the author hopes that the data presented is of interest to the participants and the KnowledgeBoard community. Further detailed analysis is planned in order to extract significant correlations from the data, at this stage all comments upon the data presented are preliminary and subject to further validation.

I would like to again thank respondents for their participation and hope to make further results available in the not too distant future.

Han van Loon
www.starswebworx.ch/starsweb
November 2004.