Painting a picture of your organization

Trying to explain how an organization of any size functions can be very difficult. And how the parts of the whole relate to external suppliers, business partners and customers just makes the whole thing even more complex.

There are two contexts in which this kind of explanation is important: To outside entities either as part of your business relationship building or for ISO 9000 certification, and to the organization itself so that lines of communication and management are well-defined.

And, of course, the only way to really communicate the detail is via the Web so that changes are instantly available to all interested parties and that smearing dead trees with ink is avoided.

I’ve just discovered a neat tool for doing exactly this: JIT Software’s (https://www.jit-software.com/) Performance Organiser and its add-on Web site generator.

Performance Organiser uses techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard, ISO 9000 and 6 Sigma to build graphical models of organizational structures. The objective is to design and define the relationships between the organization, its objectives and processes, and its performance measures, resources and key personnel.

In short, the tool allows you to capture the architecture of an organization and make it easy to update as the organization evolves. Performance Organiser can also act as an image librarian and an e-mail address book.

Now, this is where the Web site generator or HTML Generator (the company seems to be a little undecided about what to call it) comes into play. Once you’ve worked through the process of defining the organization the Web site generator can be used by anyone (technical or otherwise) to build a complete Web site in, as the company claims, “just two mouse clicks.”

The tool supports multiple languages as well as being capable of linking to Microsoft Office documents “in context,” that is, from the point in the representation of the organization where the document is relevant.

The product’s minimum requirements are a Pentium 1 system running at 133 MHz with 32 M bytes Ram, and any Windows 32 bit operating system (Win 9*, Win NT 4, Win 2000, Win XP). The minimum disk space required is 40M bytes with a further 2 to 10M bytes of disk space required for models.

Performance Organiser costs $350 per copy and a single HTML Generator license costs $100. A “Lite” version of Performance Organiser is available for $100 and 30-day demo versions are also downloadable.