Tecm 700: Business Engineering and Change Management

TECM 700: Business Engineering and Change Management

Individual Change Paper

Team 2

John Lammé

June 2, 2012

Professor: Dr. Mary Nash

Individual Change Paper

This paper will focus on an organization change situation during an Army assignment in Seoul, South Korea. I was assigned to the United States Forces Korea (USFK) Headquarters staff as an automation officer. During my spare time, I was assigned to serve as the Knowledge Management (KM) Officer for the command. It was the KM efforts that I will outline in this paper. I had to consider Drucker’s theory (Burke 159) of the business having three parts: Assumptions about the external environment, assumptions about the organization’s mission, and the assumptions about the core competencies to best determine the strengths of which to build this program. Since I became the change agent, I had to find the path of least resistance and the methodology which would provide the greatest opportunity for success. My primary responsibility on this task was to design an information management strategy to reduce the volume of irrelevant data in written reports and an improvement in information sharing among staff members within the Korean Peninsula. During my initial assessment, I found a substantial amount of redundant data stored on several military networks. The total estimated volume of redundant data was estimated to be about 19 Terabytes (1 Terabyte = At an average 5,000 characters per page, 1TB of disk space could hold 220 million pages of text & 10 Terabytes could contain the entire printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress). This extra data was accumulated by poor storage practices and little emphasis on data management by the leadership of the command. This was a transformational change (Burke 157) in the way we did business on the Korean Peninsula as all soldiers are assigned for only a single year so by the time one is up to speed on the way to conduct business; it was time for them to leave. This meant we had to institute a program that would be adopted and retained for years to come. My first priority was to identify storage practices and which key leaders who could assist me in making changes to our information management practices. I was faced with resistance from leaders when I asked them to consider reviewing published reports and perhaps reducing the size of the reports. The Colonels were outraged by my attempts to minimizing their efforts in documenting their work. My counter analysis was to not reduce the quality of the reports but to produce more concise reports to enable the commander the ability to review more compact data and enable him to make better informed