It sounds counterintuitive, but is it possible that "knowledge
workers" (that would be us) need more supervision
than they’re getting, not less? So proposes Thomas Davenport,
professor of IT and management at Babson College (in Wellesley,
Mass.) and head of the executive education program there.
In his new book
“Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from
Knowledge Workers” (Harvard Business School Press, July 2005), Davenport
says that the classic strategy of "hiring good people and leaving them
alone" is no longer good enough, if it ever was. What, then,
do knowledge workers need by way of help?
The answer matters, if, as I, you are a lifelong admirer of Peter
Drucker and take to heart his counsel that the single most important
determinant of economic performance in the 21st Century will be
maximizing the productivity of knowledge workers. To make
knowledge workers more productive, most turned first to Knowledge
Management. The concept seems unassailable: Don’t reinvent
the wheel, distribute best practices, find the expert quickly,
etc.
But
the results of the first generation of KM tools were, as all can
now admit, disappointing. What went wrong? "Most organizations
simply created one big repository for all knowledge and all workers." Stating
it so baldly constitutes a diagnosis of the problem. For
example, at
Partners HealthCare System, an organization of Harvard teaching hospitals
in the Boston area, the challenge was how to keep doctors and other
health professionals current given that some 260,000 articles a
year are added to the biomedical literature every year. The
answer? To target the doctor with the pertinent article at
the very moment it’s germane. So if he’s writing a prescription
for twice-daily Lipitor, the system lets him know a once-a-day
dose is now available, and therapeutically recommended.
Isn’t this high degree of granularity time-consuming, expensive,
and difficult to pull off? Yes, which is why Davenport admits
he likes the example of Partners HealthCare because he hasn’t found
too many others like it.
But in a law firm we don’t add 260,000 documents a year to our
repository—certainly nowhere near if you count only documents
that have some intrinsic material value past their "due by" date. Would
it be feasible for a firm committed to a fine-tuned, "bottom up"
KM system to deliver pertinent information in a more targeted manner?
Absolutely—and it will only get better over time.
By now we all know the real problem with KM is not technology,
it’s culture. So I was happy to see Davenport endorse what
I have long believed is the single most important "cultural" (psychological,
motivational) thing KM has going for it in the eyes of hyper-analytic,
competitive, super-verbal lawyers: The desire to become
a more capable and expert professional.
"I have yet to meet a knowledge worker who isn’t interested
in making him or herself better. Knowledge workers take pride in
what they do, and they want to be productive."
Maybe giving them KM tools with clear career and professional benefits
is the answer after all.
