The real McCoy — how important is knowledge work for business 2.0?

“The real McCoy” is a funny statement. One theory suggests it comes from the days when Elijah McCoy, a Black Canadian inventor, was selling lubrication systems for steam engines. Supposedly, after failed attempts by competitors to make counterfeits of his lubricant, the phrase “real McCoy” was used to refer to his authentic product [1].

Over the last few decades we’ve seen different sorts of management theories saying they’re the real McCoy. I’ve studied aspects of TQM in my psych degree. I’ve read theories of time- and performance management (if you can really call them theories at all that is). Then, of course, knowledge management came into vogue along with claims of better productivity and if you only buy this ACME KM Software Suite, knowledge management and protecting the intellectual capital of your organisation comes with it like a set of steak knives.

But are any of these real? Do any of these products of theories actually give the modern workplace any competitive advantage?

Most of these ideas are just common sense wrapped in pretty cellophane and are largely untested in empirical terms. But as we all know, common sense is hardly common. Even Drucker’s work on productivity for knowledge workers, that sharing what you know, had very limited empirical data to back it up … until probably quite recently that is.

I’ve been enjoying Haas and Hansen’s [2] research into knowledge work and the different productivity benefits that can be gained from sharing knowledge in modern organisations — something vital to the success of businesses evolving toward 2.0 to take advantage of the Knowledge Economy and advances in social software. Specifically, Haas and Hansen asked the questions:

• does sharing knowledge save time?
• does sharing knowledge improve work quality?
• does a knowledge worker’s level of experience improve the signaling of their competency?
• does a knowledge worker’s lack of effort decrease the signaling of their competency?

Here’s what they found:

“our results demonstrate, knowledge sharing clearly has costs as well as benefits, including the investments required to rework documents and secure assistance from colleagues”

“because the costs of knowledge sharing may sometimes outweigh the benefits, using electronic documents and personal advice from colleagues around the firm does not necessarily help — and sometimes actually hurts — task-level performance”

“high quality documents offered greater benefits for saving time than for improving work quality in this study, while lack of effort by colleagues imposed greater costs on work quality than on time”

“electronic document usage primarily saves time but does not improve quality or signals of competence suggests that a firm’s repositories of codified knowledge can be viewed as an efficiency play”

“firms that primarily compete on quality can benefit most from emphasizing personal advice usage … and perhaps downplaying electronic document usage”

Even while ACME pushed KM until it killed it, knowledge management is still alive and has important lessons, real lessons, for us to learn. While other management theories have very little basis in reality, knowledge management is the real McCoy.

M

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[1]. Wikipedia. The Real McCoy. Online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_McCoy

[2]. Haas, M. R. & Hansen, M. T. Different Knowledge, Different Benefits: Toward a Productivity Perspective on Knowledge Sharing in Organizations. Online at: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/…/3b154e913b7c5a40, accessed on 15 Dec, 2007.

Knowledge work — where is the emphasis?

Microsoft recently surveyed 500 UK business leaders and found that a knowledge of information technology was seen as the seventh most important workplace skill. Instead, team working and interpersonal skills were seen as the core factors, followed by initiative [1].

1. Team working and interpersonal skills
2. Initiative
3. Analysing and problem solving
4. Verbal communication
5. Personal planning and organising
6. Flexibility
7. IT skills

“One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker,” said Gates. That’s true for everyone from the retail store worker, who has to know about their products in order to sell them, to the chief executive, who uses business intelligence software to analyse critical market trends [2].

Ol’ Bill Gates is right when he says the emphasis has changed. Drucker saw it over 50 years ago, before PCs or the web, when he introduced the term Knowledge Economy [3]:

“…the rules and practices that determined success in the industrial economy of the 20th century need rewriting in an interconnected world where resources such as know-how are more critical than other economic resources. These rules need to be rewritten at the levels of firms and industries in terms of knowledge management and at the level of public policy as knowledge policy or knowledge-related policy.”

This is not an emphasis, though, on formally teaching people how to use PCs, Micro$oft Office software, the web, blogs, wikis or Google. And while Anne Zelenka would have us believe otherwise, it’s not about ‘webwork‘. It’s about recognising that we now live in a world where we use knowledge and information on a daily basis and that sharing it should be front of mind — that is:

• sharing ways of doing things
• sharing best-practice and better practice
• sharing information and where we found it
• being collaborative rather than secretive

And Bill agrees: “innovation … requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people [including] customers”.

What is needed, therefore, is an environment that supports and encourages, sharing rather than hoarding knowledge, in a way that is platform and delivery agnostic. This is because, as Haas and Hansen report [4], sharing codified knowledge in electronic form generally saves time but doesn’t improve work quality. Person-to-person sharing, though, improves work quality and signaled competence to others. I think this is largely due to the benefits that are had from the actual, real-time interaction that can be had from story-telling — a process that can impede task performance because it can be so damned time consuming, but is better for the actual transfer of knowledge.

So don’t dwell, as the Americains do, on BPR or SAP as the be-all and end-all of knowledge management. The wiki-way won’t get you there either. And nor will web-worker tools. The only way is to share — a social phenomenon, not a software one.

Image © Hugh McLeod - www.gapingvoid.com 2007.

This is where the emphasis should be.

M
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[1]. Computer knowledge ‘undervalued’ (2007). BBC News. Friday, 14 December 2007, 12:01 GMT. Online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7143417.stm, accessed on 15 Dec, 2007.

[2]. BBC News (2007). Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed. Friday, 14 December 2007, 00:01 GMT. Online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7142073.stm, accessed on 15 Dec, 2007.

[3]. Peter Drucker, (1969). The Age of Discontinuity; Guidelines to Our changing Society. Harper and Row, New York. ISBN 0-465-08984-4

[4]. Haas, M. R. & Hansen, M. T. Different Knowledge, Different Benefits: Toward a Productivity Perspective on Knowledge Sharing in Organizations. Online at: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/…/3b154e913b7c5a40, accessed on 15 Dec, 2007.

Joshua Porter, the long-tail, and social design

Joshua Porter recently wrote on the Long Tail and social design. It’s a good reminder of how consumers benefit more from access to increased product variety than their benefit from access to lower prices online [1].

Joshua suggests that because of the way the Long Tail works, catering to minority tastes, the marketplace is forced into a design that enables “users help each other” (either implicitly or explicitly) to locate goods that wouldn’t be commercially viable to produce and sell under “real-world” economic models. Obviously, this design needs to be based on an understanding of social interaction, and, having just recently delivered a talk on user-centred design, his suggestion of “social design” immediately drew me in.

Much of what IAs do is bound in user-centred design — a methodology that ensures people’s wants and needs are taken into consideration when designing systems like websites. These needs include both the ‘what’ in terms of requirements, as well as ‘how’ they want to interact with the system. For IAs, this means we need to understand an individual’s interaction preferences and behaviour so we can create, amongst a number of things, navigation models and information classification schemes that work for them.

As social computing tools become more widely adopted in systems, something that we’re going to need to do better is understand models of social interaction, organisational culture and group dynamics, so we can architect systems that facilitate aspects of group behaviour in online environments.

For organisations embarking on the enterprise 2.0 journey, while user-centred design is important for your system’s project methodology, social design is vital to knowing your clients’ consumer-to-consumer interactions as well as their user-to-business interactions, to ensure you’re going to meet all their long-tail needs.

IAs … it’s time to add social design to your tool set.

M
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[1]. Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith (2006) From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail