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Employee
Profile: Fran O'Brien
April 2008
International
Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), 2008,
New York City, NY
Boston
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March 2008 |
Vol. 16, No. 1 |
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Employee Profile: Fran O'Brien
Originally from Ohio, Fran earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University. Further education at the Graduate School of Business, University of Texas brought him to the world of management consulting where he has worked for the past 21 years.
Fran began his career developing mathematical models to support production planning with a small operations research consulting firm and has worked with consulting firms that focused on both strategic and operational issues. He has had the opportunity to tackle challenges on a variety of projects across a broad spectrum of leading companies in the pharmaceutical, consumer products, and energy industries.
Improving and Streamlining
the Information Life Cycle
At Information Mapping, as a member of the Professional
Services team, Fran focuses on
helping clients improve and streamline their information life cycle to
support a business process. The improvement process for the information
life cycle includes
- assessing what information is needed to support a business process
- defining an architecture that facilitates creation, storage, navigation, and access
- having a clear and consistent process for creating content
- deploying content to the appropriate end users, and
- ongoing management of the content life cycle process.
According to Fran, “The most interesting part of my job is discovering where in the information life cycle a particular client organization needs to focus the improvement process. For some, the issue is that critical content has never really been formally captured and exists only as ‘tribal knowledge.’ Key parts of engagements we have had involve capturing and packaging experience for organizations as different as a professional training organization and a manufacturer of industrial appliances.”
“More frustrating for clients are those situations where content does exist but end users cannot easily find it, or find multiple, sometimes conflicting sources, and are not sure which is correct,” says Fran. “Organizations with these challenges clearly benefit from defining and implementing an information and navigation architecture for organizing and accessing their content. We have had the opportunity to develop architectures for clients as diverse as governmental agencies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and petroleum companies.”
Other clients, according to Fran, may lack a defined process to keep content current or need writing standards to promote consistency in presentation.
Information Mapping
Takes an Integrated Approach
Fran notes that “regardless of where we begin the improvement process,
we invariably find that the best solution involves an integrated approach
involving each component of the content life cycle. It is difficult to
address any aspect of the life cycle without impacting the whole. We find
this is true for any industry.”
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