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Wednesday, April 24, 2002 |
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My current list of KM tools:
Others?? ...card catalogs, lab notebooks, portals, search engines, books, encyclopedias, graph paper, file cabinets, book shelves, whiteboards, flip charts, ... How would you move up a level of abstraction and cluster/chunk these tools into useful categories? |
Transferring best practices (or leading practices, if you prefer) when those practices have a significant knowledge component, is very tricky work. What Szulanski is calling attention to is the difficulty in untangling all the elements that contribute to effectiveness in a process and the difficulty of transplanting that process into a different environment. What we have are complex systems of interacting parts. While there might be a superficial resemblance to industrial processes where we can essentially ignore the brains of the operators, this resemblance can be dangerously misleading. More than anything else, Szulanski is asking us to appreciate and respect our limitations. |
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Knowledge Worker Productivity ... The greatest asset of a 21st century company are its knowledge workers and their productivity. But making knowledge workers more productive is going to be a major challenge. Among these knowledge workers, educating the technologists is crucial for developed countries to maintain their competitive advantage. This challenge has somewhat been addressed in the US with its nationwide system of community colleges. I do have a concern with the definition of quality. If each knowledge worker himself defines the quality of his work, how does one define a quality benchmark across the board say for a particular trade like a group of neurosurgeons or research scientists working on the same problem. In addition, the productivity of the knowledge worker will in most cases require the work itself to be restructured. What will be the costs of this restructuring? I don't think Drucker was making a claim that no one else could participate in defining quality in knowledge work. Rather, he is making the point that, unlike manual laborers, knowledge workers have to be part of the quality definition process. This is fundamentally different than classical industrial engineering practice, which treats the worker as a fungible component. One of the shifts I see happening as we turn our attention to knowledge worker productivty is more focus on outcomes than on inputs or on process, which is one of the things putting KM at odds with reengineering. If we are working with neurosurgeons to understand quality, our focus will likely be on survival and recovery rates of patients. It doesn't help to treat twice as many patients if half of them die in recovery. We also ought not to be especially concerned with trying to overspecify the surgeon's technique. As to costs of restructuring, there's an implicit assumtion you make that we have some sense of the baseline costs to begin with. I'm inclined to believe that we have way too much knowledge work being done today with nary a lick of structure. We need to be careful to use questions about costs as a way to deeper understanding rather than as a club to stifle innovation. |
A useful entry point to this set of tems and concepts. Also identifies the key vendors. ECM largely assumes that you believe in a top-down implementation strategy, which sounds good in theory but generally crashes on the rocks of organizational reality. |
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The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker. [Knowledge and Learning Solutions] Which probably needs to start with some hard thinking about what constitutes productivity in knowledge work. Output/input isn't going to help very much now is it? |
Last update: 10/20/2005; 10:56:25 AM .
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