Search results matching tags 'Transfer of innovation' and 'Communication Channels'

"How Technology Enables Transformation of Human Service Administration" by M. Geffen and J. Kost

jstengel — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:29:24 GMT

This article focuses on human service organizations whose ultimate service mission to public clientele is attainment of self-sufficiency. The authors cite various reasons for an ever-evolving 21^st Century human services model of enormous complexity that must exponentially increase its service delivery capability to keep up with increasing and varied client demands; demands which, in turn, are fraught with an increase in the pace and frequency of individual needs. Thus, that ultimate goal of users of social services realistically achieving self-sufficiency becomes still more elusive. Simply bisected, the current service delivery evolution supports innovative change on two orchestrated flanks: (1) technology and (2) human support. The latter flank must undergo reverberating changes in front-line service worker jobs and that of their case managers as a result of admittedly late-arriving technical changes in the former flank.

The authors offer a well-defined “categorical grip” to interested readers for getting a conceptual handle on the technologically-based tools involved in exponentially keeping apace of diverse human service needs: integrated case management solutions (e.g., residing on CRM platforms), sophisticated eligibility (etc) rules engines, workflow tools that integrate and make seamless multiple (triaged) services, knowledge management and collaboration tools, computer tablets and other devices for users’ remote access to services, and advanced data integration/business intelligence tools providing real-time data where imminently required.

Some of this recommended technology comes by way of budget-friendly COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software and hardware; some of which also lends itself to increasing client participation in needed services (self-sufficiency), while raising the service performance bar for human service agencies. The authors add three recommended caveats: (1) overhauling the procurement process (which inhibits multiyear turnkey projects in general); (2) acting on the foreknowledge that vendors of COTS solutions are as important as the products they promote (i.e., issues regarding installation, integration, and maintenance); and (3) having internal technical support readily available to create easier and more meaningful ways for diverse users to use an upgraded system to its fullest (operations side of knowledge management).

Citation

Geffen, M. and J. Kost (2006). "How Technology Enables Transformation of Human Service Administration." Policy & Practice of Public Human Services 64(4): 14-17.

Toward a Sociology of the Network Society

jstengel — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

This article invokes a provocative view of a changed society poised on the cusp of high potential for innovation because all of us (in developed nations) now function amidst a vast complex of macro-level social networks (and thusly a new framework for the study of sociology needs to be erected). Just when consortium members might think they’re ready to spin hypotheses about promising innovative inroads in technology and organizational culture, Castell comes along with fresh insight into our changed society in ways that possibly alter the rules of engagement in innovation generation.

The author offers a glimpse of some macro-level social and technological networks that amend our current view of society enough to seemingly need to be accounted for in present thinking (yet give sufficient pause to hamper forward progress?).

The author cites information technology, globalization, the WWW, and the dilution of the sovereign nation-state as four axes of significant societal restructuring we’ve undergone. He further describes examples of macro-level networks impacting our lives in ways that have indirectly reshaped society as we’ve known it; these changes brought on by current technology, the author seems to suggest, have spawned a diffusion of innovative “side effects” on the social structure itself.

Citation

Castells, M. (2000). "Toward a Sociology of the Network Society." Contemporary Sociology 29(5): 693-699.

“Futures That Work: Using Search Conferences to Revitalize Companies, Communities, and Organizations”

jstengel — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:13:21 GMT

A search conference is a participative planning event that enables people to create a plan for the most desirable future of their community or organization, a plan they carry out themselves. Search conferencing has a long, rich history. The first search conference happened in 1960 in Great Britain when leaders of two aircraft engine manufacturers came together in the first search conference to merge their two companies into one. The inventors of the method and the leaders of that first search were social scientists Fred Emery and Eric Trist. The search conference is a practical way to build communities of people who step up to the challenges of our turbulent times and take responsibility for making change happen in a purposeful way. As the world becomes more and more turbulent, the need is great for people to form communities to search for their desirable futures together. The search conference puts people in the driver’s seat of change, so they can steer together toward the future they want for their system, making adjustments as they go forward.

This book has a detailed description of what happens in a search conference, identifies the many ways it can be used, the principles that it is based on, how to plan for a search conference, and stories from many different organizations, from a Palestinian YMCA to Microsoft. It is a good guide for those who want to bring together a group of people to plan strategically and holistically and, importantly, in an accountable and sustainable way to implement what they plan. It also begins to shift organizations to a more open and participative culture.

Citation

Rehm, R., Cebula, N., Ryan, F., Large, M. (2002), “Futures That Work: Using Search Conferences to Revitalize Companies, Communities, and Organizations”, New Society Publishing and Hawthorn Press.