San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Vincent Lin
500523506
1) What are the business goals of SFPUC? How is knowledge management related to those goals?
The business goals of San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is to encourage efficient use of water and reducing water pollution, which is done by offering education, technical and financial assistance to all of its customers. The SFPUC provides water, treats wastewater and supplies municipal power services to 2.4 million customers in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Knowledge management is related to these goals because it could not meet these goals if the company is losing more than 20% of its Baby Bloomer employees by 2009. The company had to find a way were they could retain the knowledge base of current technical employees to train new generations. Knowledge management help store these data so future employees would have the skills required to perform efficiently and effectively.
2) What were some of the challenges faced by SFPUC? What management, organization, and technology factors were responsible for those challenges?
There were two great challenges that faced the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2009 to maintain they’re high level of operation competency. To fight against the baby boomer retirement phase, the challenge of knowledge capture, knowledge management and knowledge transfer were notable. The second challenge was the reliability and accountability issue of implementing a vast number of new workers in a short period of time. The SFPUC went with a business process management and workflow solution, Enterprise Process Center (EPC), to manage knowledge retention issues and establish new ways to distribute and share information across organizations. The SFPUC provided step by step procedures to ensure all necessary training information is available for all employees to access on demand.
3) Describe how implementing EPC