Unfortunately, I had to step away from the conference for a couple of hours for some unrelated business — a group podcast that you’ll see here shortly, and an upcoming webinar — but I was back in time to see Leopoldo Fuentes of AxxiS Consulting discuss a project at the Secreteria de la Funcion Publica de Mexico for implementing best practices within the federal government using ARIS.
One of the first things that they did was to create a knowledge repository for the results defined by their strategic planning process:
- Organization charts, HR profiles, position descriptions, and knowledge maps
- Compliance information
- Activity analysis
- Operational flows
- A set of process models derived from all of the above
Once the repository was populated with this information, they could start to leverage it for a number of transformational purposes:
- To professionalize human resources of the institution
- To develop the talent of the institution
- To supply the decision making
- To transform the ministry into a world-class institution
Not surprisingly, it all came down to process: the process models ultimately allowed them to define the roles and skills of people that they required. However, it had a number of other process improvement type of benefits as well, such as being able to use process models in strategic planning activities, gain some process improvement through better understanding of the processes, and changes to the organization charts to better match the process models. Using custom scripting (rather than the report web publication capabilities of ARIS, which did not allow them the proper degree of change control on the website), they also publish this on their intranet and, selectively, on the public internet, thereby increasing transparency of the organization. You can see the public portions of this here, including the profiles and roles of individual public servants (my Spanish is really bad, so I now can’t find the right link to navigate to those sections, but go ahead and poke around). This type of transparency is becoming a critical factor in most government organizations these days.