Evaluation of a Classification System for Best Practices

The practical problem addressed in this paper is that it can be problematic to find appropriate best practices (BPs) in a large collection of BPs, covering many different domains, within an organizational database. Our goal was to propose a classification system of BP documentation to facilitate effective use and retrieval of BPs documents in such a large collection of BPs, independent of any domains. We have designed such a domain independent classification system and evaluated it with practitioners and academic experts. We found that all the BP characteristics and labeled values in the proposed classification system were recognized and applied by practitioners as well as academic experts. However, it turned out that some of the characteristics were particularly useful. These characteristics were: implementation area, level of formalization, completeness of description, Balanced Scorecard perspectives, and management process.