How Does a Best Practice become Better?

The notion of a best practice is not new. Frederick Taylor (1919)^[1] said as much nearly 100 years ago: “among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest”. This viewpoint came to be known as the "one best way" (Kanigel, 1997)^[2].

History, however, is filled with examples of people who were unwilling to accept the industry standard as the best way to do anything. The enormous technological changes since the Industrial Revolutions in England and the United States bear witness to this fact. For example, at one time horses were considered the 'best' form of transportation, even after 'horse-less carriages' were invented. Today, most people drive a gasoline, diesel, or bio-fuel vehicle—itself an improvement on the horse-less carriage.

In real-world application, Best Practice is a very useful concept. Despite the need to improve on processes as times change and things evolve, Best Practice is considered by some as a business buzzword used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use for management, policy, and especially software systems.

Best Practices are commonly used in many Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Marketing Operations Management (MOM) systems. A Best Practice can be selected (generally from several competing options) and defined within a computer system. Then, any organization performing similar tasks can draw from the same procedure, and theoretically improve their operations.

Human Resources is one example of Best Practices as implemented in MOM systems. There are numerous standard procedures defined when managing an organisation's employees, volunteers, and contractors. By choosing a "Best Practice" or standard way of organizing and performing processes, the makers of MOM systems or Human Resource Management (HRM) system software are able to produce systems that can be used by multiple organisations.

Because such systems are restrictive by nature, implementing Best Practices by using such software may force organizations who have less formally defined procedures to conform to a single standard. Deviation from this standard may require a change to the software. Avoiding these related costs may be a motivating factor in choosing to conform.

Newly discovered Best Practices and changing industry standards often heavily influence ERP/MOM/HRM system design. Recent pressures on companies to change quickly in emerging global marketplaces have forced many vendors to be more flexible in how Best Practices are defined and implemented

Remember, today's Best practices continually evolve