Cultural Survey results

Surveying the status of organizational culture, improvement and innovation in the SPICE and Knowledge Management communities.

Initial survey results - Part 2

Results.

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.

Figure 1 Business focus

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.

Figure 2. Organisation type

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.

Figure 3. Role / position

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.

Figure 4. Importance of personnel

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.

Go to part 3

If you would like a printable report or a specific comparative profiling for your organisation versus the surveyed organisations, please email me.

Han van Loon