John Husband reflects on the The AppGap Blog on a potential new way of defining org charts using tags that would define your knowledge and skills …
He bases this idea on the fact that the organizational structure of many companies just keeps changing anyway, and the org chart is therefore not really a static document.
“So … what if work meant that at different times and for different projects, you could get *tagged* with different tags for different skills, and *linked* with other relevant of pertinent skill and personality *tags*, and so on ? … Hierarchies could be developed at a specific time, for as long as may be necessary, and may involve different people or peoples depending upon the situation, the problems and the desired or hoped-for outcomes.”
I would add that traditional org charts are the very basis of the famous ‘Silo mentality’ that everybody nowadays pretends they’re fighting!
So, I like John’s idea, even if it would only really be convenient in larger organizations.
These tags could be combined with tags from articles posted by the people on their (internal) blog, and be linked to similar tags used by other people in the organization to form a new Org Chart that would actually better reflects how the company is really organized …
Actually most of the Enterprise Social Softwares already offer the blog tags linking part of it. But adding the knowledge and skills tagging would be a plus in my opinion.
Does anyone agree or disagree?
Tags would preferably be used more for a resource pool management and would definitely help for forming a project team. I doubt this could handle supervisor/supervisee aspect. Or did I miss the ball here ?
Tagging articles doesn’t imply necessarally skills, but interest to a subject (described by the tag).
unless you have something like [supervisor] [manager] […] in your tags.
The org chart specific tags could be set-up by HR to ensure some sort of uniformity.
The other tags, coming from the articles, would be an additional layer of information.
[supervisor],[manager] would be again attributes because they do not provide information as such to build the orgchart. To build an orgchart the key elements are the parentship between the employees. Minimal elements for each employee must be composed of a Unique ID + a reference to 1 other Unique ID (the reporting line). You might also consider one or multiple dotted line supervisor identified by Unique ID. Any other info are bonus and they could well be stored by tags is you want to.
not if you have a tag giving you the department / team / … in which you are right now!
With the ‘department’ tag and the role tag, you have all the linking you need …
The whole idea is to let go of unique IDs! You have to stop thinking by ways of databases! ;o)
The whole concept of ‘tags’ resides in the possibility to go beyond relational databases.