Job Titles, Intranet Permissions and Processes
Process orientated companies, as opposed to departmentally divided ones – will often place little emphasis on job titles and much more on general expertise. They expect a persons contribution to be based on their knowledge sets, but to take place in whichever process most needs them.
When we set up Intranet permissions in new intranet projects the default is usually to base at least one permission set – normally ‘Groups’ – on the departmental structures, and use ‘Roles’ to reflect much more the nature of the persons job – such as ‘manager’ or ‘administrator’ – thus allowing easy collaboration by roles across departments, as well as within them.
Since Claromentis can localize the names of permission sets, perhaps we should offer a set of permission structures that are more process-orientated. For many companies this would not be too hard to think about – ‘role’ can be the expertise area, particularly as each ‘expertise area’ can be defined as having multiple skills, and users can provide information on how they rank for all these skill sets.
Groups could then be ‘Processes’ – or however the company prefers to name them. A user could therefore be assigned to the ‘Product Development’ process but have core ‘Engineer’ expertise, with rankings for the various skills that company Engineers might have.
This would make searching for staff to contribute to a new process, or one that was struggling with workload, simple – as Claromentis already allows searching for any combination of skills within users of a particular role.
In common with career development in process orientated companies, users can also have multiple roles, allowing them to gain practical experience by working in different processes over time.
For some companies making such a change at the same time as deploying a new intranet and collaboration platform might be too much to absorb – but for others that have been considering becoming more process orientated the implementation of these ideas might be facilitated by a platform that is naturally organized along process based lines