[there are five news stories in this post.]
CIO Magazine :: Putting It All Together Again - The New Work Order
by Tom Davenport
...My own hypothesis is that the best way to segment knowledge workers would be by the roles they perform within the organization. I would guess that determining whether you're a "field sales analyst" or a "midlevel marketing manager" would drive the type of work you do and how it could be done more productively and effectively. Of course, that will be difficult and perhaps expensive. Most organizations don't even know how many roles they have. I suspect the only role-based segments that might make sense are those in which there are many workers in a single segment, or in which better productivity or performance is mission-critical...
vnunet.com Email: The cholesterol of modern business
by Mark Raskino
...The proliferation of email is getting out of control and our inboxes are full of stuff that shouldn't be there. All this is symptomatic of something deeper: the detritus of poorly managed knowledge work.
We want to be a true knowledge economy, and not a data-processing economy. To achieve this, Gartner believes that the IT industry has to radically improve the productivity of knowledge workers and work teams over the next decade. ...
New strategic value to business will come from productivity advances in true knowledge work, including product design, risk management and analysis of customer behaviour. ...
We will need innovative work in sociology, psychology and anthropology to accompany the expected advances in hardware, software and telecommunications. Knowledge workers need new tools and techniques to create more wealth from fewer keystrokes.
There are signs that IT departments are starting to address the challenge. Gartner has received many questions about how to create and manage taxonomies for classifying and managing information. This suggests that organisations are starting to invest in more strategic knowledge management projects.
Such work, of course, is for the long term. And in the short term, the flood of emails can only grow bigger. It is likely to become a strategic issue.
These are some of the steps managers need to take to reduce the email burden on knowledge workers:
* Limit file sizes. Managers should set and maintain tough limits on email account sizes
* Promote advanced user training. Few people move beyond the basics of using email
* Move applications off the email system. Administrative tasks, such as time sheets or expenses, are better handled on corporate portals and intranets
* Offer alternative channels of communication. Instant messaging and telephone conferencing can lighten the load
* Establish policies and etiquette
* Lead by intervention
HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation: Why Managing Innovation is Like Theater
by Rob Austin and Lee Devin
A stage production and the development of your next product have a lot in common. An excerpt from Artful Making by HBS professor Robert D. Austin and dramaturge Lee Devin.
...There is an increasingly important category of work - knowledge work - that you can best manage by not enforcing a detailed, in-advance set of objectives, even if you could. Often in this kind of work, time spent planning what you want to do will be better spent actually doing (or letting others in your charge do), trying something you haven't thought out in detail so you can quickly incorporate what you learn from the experience in the next attempt. In appropriate conditions - only in appropriate conditions - you can gain more value from experience than from up-front analysis. In certain kinds of work, even if you can figure out where you're going and find a map to get you there, that may not be the best thing to do.
Forging ahead without detailed specifications to guide you obviously requires innovation, new actions. We take this observation one step further by suggesting that knowledge work, which adds value in large part because of its capacity for innovation, can and often should be structured as artists structure their work. Managers should look to collaborative artists rather than to more traditional management models if they want to create economic value in this new century.
We call this approach artful making. "Artful," because it derives from the theory and practice of collaborative art and requires an artist-like attitude from managers and team members. "Making," because it requires that you conceive of your work as altering or combining materials into a form, for a purpose.2 Materials thus treated become something new, something they would not become without the intervention of a maker. This definition usually points to work that changes physical materials, iron ore and charcoal into steel, for instance. But the work and management we're considering don't always do that. Instead they mostly operate in imagination, in the realm of knowledge and ideas. While artful making improves anything that exhibits interdependency among its parts, we're not primarily concerned with heating metal and beating it into shapes. We're more concerned with strategies, product designs, or software - new things that groups create by thinking, talking, and collaborating...
Excerpted with permission of the authors from Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work by Robert D. Austin and Lee Devin. Copyright © 2003 by Pearson Education, Inc.
New Zealand's National Business Review :: Market survey rates Kiwi IT
by Stephen Ballantyne
...A report into the way New Zealand IT and financial professionals regard the uses of information technology has shed some interesting light on to differences between attitudes here and in Britain.
Prepared by market survey business NFO at the behest of Fuji Xerox New Zealand, the report summarises a survey of 200 professionals in New Zealand's larger companies. The survey questions repeated those already given to a similar group of British professionals. ...
...surprisingly few have much idea of what constitutes a "knowledge worker" -- the most preferred definition was someone "who applies their brain or brings knowledge to the company."
Fuji Xerox will hold a public briefing to discuss the survey and its findings in Auckland next Tuesday. To attend, register online at www.fujixerox.co.nz...
TechRepublic :: Vendors take two paths to XML-enabled office suites
By Rita E. Knox and Michael A. Silver
...Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have very different ideas about what they expect users and enterprises to do with XML. Sun underestimates the potential value of semantic tags and the growth of user understanding of how to exploit these tags. Microsoft overestimates enterprises' preparedness to develop XML schema. Some middle ground that provides general-purpose schema with semantic tags for frequently used document types (memos, e-mail messages) will be needed. ...
XML entered office suites in 2002. Through YE03, its presence will spread to other office applications and, potentially, will have a much greater impact on the general knowledge worker. The successful integration will require enterprise investments and user training.
Sun Microsystems shipped StarOffice v.6 in May 2002; OpenOffice.org v.1 (an open source version of StarOffice) was shipped in April 2002. These suites include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications that import and export files in XML file format by default, but can also open and save Microsoft file formats by default.
Microsoft will make Office 2003 generally available in September or October 2003 (0.8 probability). Office 2003 will have improved XML support in Excel and add XML support to Word. Office 2003 will import and export XML data files, as well as save files in the .doc and .rtf file formats...
K-Collector