Often, I find that news about 'knowledge workers' is sparse, and then at other times, there is a veritable clump of reporting on this subject.
Today's stories are: Gartner continues to report that Linux is unsuitable for knowledge workers; Microsoft wins eWeek's Excellence Awards in the Personal Productivity category with their OneNote product; Russ Altman and Larry Prusak's share views [in two separate articles] on knowledge workers and the globalization of the knowledge economy; and finally, the UK's need for 'knowledge workers' has been dramatically over-estimated and there is now a glut of over-qualified workers in the UK.
Today, eBCVG Network Security reports that Gartner said, "Linux can be adopted now by mainstream enterprises for users performing specific, limited tasks." However, Gartner also said that adoption for general use by knowledge workers would continue to be hampered by high migration costs and the inability to run legacy Windows 32 applications.
Then eWeek writer Anne Chen, in an article about Personal Productivity reports that Microsoft's OneNote won this year's Excellence Awards Personal Productivity category. "Because it enables users to write notes on documents and then organize those documents in a manner that is easily searchable, OneNote is a solid and useful application to knowledge workers in the field - particularly those who take full advantage of mobile hardware such as the Tablet PC."
Over at IDG's ComputerWorld in Wellington, Stephen Bell writes - Code generation to return, says Altman [Ross Altman, chief technical officer of integration software vendor SeeBeyond.]
"Even if jobs do go, one possible merit of offshore coding is that it forces developers to create very "tight" and detailed specifications before they give the work to the coders. This is of most benefit where a traditional "waterfall" style of development is practised; it does not lend itself to prototyping, rapid application development or other agile styles, like extreme programming."
Stephen Bell also reflects that Altman "is more sceptical than his compatriot Larry Prusak about knowledge workers' jobs drifting overseas." And, in another article written last week on - Trust Vital for e-commerce Stephen reported on Larry Prusak's knowledge worker views:
"The dissemination and management of knowledge is the most important story of the 21st century," he says. It was pretty important in previous centuries too, but in the modern world, where capital chases cheap labour, the way to ensure continuing employment for the individual and continuing health for a company's balance sheet or a nation's economy is to get into work that "can't be done by an algorithm and can't be done [in a cheap-labour overseas country]".
And, last but not least, an article in PersonnelToday reports that UK Academics lament glut of graduates - "The UK is producing too many graduates and the demand for 'knowledge workers' has been seriously over-estimated, leading academics have revealed. A study of more than 28 million UK jobs found that only 32 per cent were knowledge-based, traditionally requiring a university graduate. This falls well short of the current government estimates, which suggest that between 70 and 80 per cent of the workforce are knowledge-based workers."
K-Collector Topics: categories Hardware Knowledge Economy Knowledge Management Knowledge Organisation knowledge work Productivity Security Tablet PC Writing