How to develop a good knowledge worker?
UBIQUITY: So then what does it take to develop a good knowledge worker?
DAVENPORT: Well, the approach adopted by most organizations in the past is that all you really had to do is hire high-quality people in the first place — I refer to this as the HSPALTA syndrome ("Hire Smart People and Leave Them Alone). Of course, it's always a good idea to hire smart and capable people, and so it's always a good idea to put a lot of energy into attracting the right kind of knowledge workers and retaining them; but in my book I really focus on what are the kind of interventions you can make into making knowledge workers more effective. These include technological interventions, managerial interventions, workplace interventions, and social interventions.
UBIQUITY: Talk a little about those different kinds of interventions, starting with technological interventions.
DAVENPORT: I divided them into two types. First, there are things you do at an organizational level — things that from an IT perspective would be seen as applications for helping groups of knowledge workers do their work. One of my favorite examples is the approach taken by Partners HealthCare, which takes the knowledge a physician needs and embeds it into the structure of the work, and provides an electronic ordering system that has all the knowledge built into it; it's been fantastically successful, and basically every hospital in the land would like to do something similar. You know, it would be quite unsettling for a patient to hear the physician saying, "I've never really seen this before, I'm going to go do a quick Google search on it." For some reason we think that's bad behavior in physicians, though in other professions we think it would be very responsible. But with the Partners HealthCare approach the knowledge is in a sense injected into the nature of the daily work. In my book I give some other real-life examples but there aren't nearly as many of those as there ought to be.
UBIQUITY: Interesting. What's the second category?
DAVENPORT: And then the other, more general category I talk about is personal information and knowledge management, which is even less common than organizational applications. Every organization gives its knowledge workers Outlook or Lotus Notes or a spreadsheet or something like that, but they don't really help the knowledge workers figure out how to use these things effectively despite. The average knowledge worker spends 3 hours and 14 minutes a day just processing electronic information, so why not lend them a hand in doing this effectively? Intel is a particularly good example or an organization that does this right. Intel employees do 8,300 Web conferences and 19,000 audio conferences a week, so the company decided, Gee, if we're going to do these quite this frequently maybe we could help people by giving them some templates for running an effective meeting with electronic tools, and we could let them customize their office-related software to accommodate these things. So Intel did some nice segmentation based on how mobile the workers are and how aggressively they use new technology, and the company used the segmentation data to figure out what solutions made sense for what different types of knowledge workers. It's probably the single most aggressive firm on this kind of personal dimension.
UBIQUITY: Tell us now about the other types of intervention are.
DAVENPORT: First, there are interventions into the physical workplace. The frustrating thing about this one is that we do these interventions every day but we don't really learn anything because we don't do any measurements.
UBIQUITY: Example?
DAVENPORT: We move people from closed offices to open offices, or we move them into shared-office "hoteling" environments, or we tell them to work at home instead of coming into the office; in fact, we typically change multiple things at once, and we give them a new manager and new computer stuff and change the office kind of all at the same time. So we have not a clue about what's effective and what's not. A good example of creative workplace design is a place like IDEO, which basically offers free choice about what you want your workspace to look like. You're given your little area and if you want to bring in an airplane wing because you think it's got a really inspiring design and will help you be a better product designer, that's just fine with IDEO, as long as you can find a way to fix it to the ceiling so it won't fall on anybody. It uses a "mass-personalized" solution, which combines a group work setting low on segmentation (all employees share the same standard group work setting), but high on individual choice (employees are encouraged to bring in their own creative accoutrements to supplement the group solution).
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DAVENPORT: Well, the approach adopted by most organizations in the past is that all you really had to do is hire high-quality people in the first place — I refer to this as the HSPALTA syndrome ("Hire Smart People and Leave Them Alone). Of course, it's always a good idea to hire smart and capable people, and so it's always a good idea to put a lot of energy into attracting the right kind of knowledge workers and retaining them; but in my book I really focus on what are the kind of interventions you can make into making knowledge workers more effective. These include technological interventions, managerial interventions, workplace interventions, and social interventions.
UBIQUITY: Talk a little about those different kinds of interventions, starting with technological interventions.
DAVENPORT: I divided them into two types. First, there are things you do at an organizational level — things that from an IT perspective would be seen as applications for helping groups of knowledge workers do their work. One of my favorite examples is the approach taken by Partners HealthCare, which takes the knowledge a physician needs and embeds it into the structure of the work, and provides an electronic ordering system that has all the knowledge built into it; it's been fantastically successful, and basically every hospital in the land would like to do something similar. You know, it would be quite unsettling for a patient to hear the physician saying, "I've never really seen this before, I'm going to go do a quick Google search on it." For some reason we think that's bad behavior in physicians, though in other professions we think it would be very responsible. But with the Partners HealthCare approach the knowledge is in a sense injected into the nature of the daily work. In my book I give some other real-life examples but there aren't nearly as many of those as there ought to be.
UBIQUITY: Interesting. What's the second category?
DAVENPORT: And then the other, more general category I talk about is personal information and knowledge management, which is even less common than organizational applications. Every organization gives its knowledge workers Outlook or Lotus Notes or a spreadsheet or something like that, but they don't really help the knowledge workers figure out how to use these things effectively despite. The average knowledge worker spends 3 hours and 14 minutes a day just processing electronic information, so why not lend them a hand in doing this effectively? Intel is a particularly good example or an organization that does this right. Intel employees do 8,300 Web conferences and 19,000 audio conferences a week, so the company decided, Gee, if we're going to do these quite this frequently maybe we could help people by giving them some templates for running an effective meeting with electronic tools, and we could let them customize their office-related software to accommodate these things. So Intel did some nice segmentation based on how mobile the workers are and how aggressively they use new technology, and the company used the segmentation data to figure out what solutions made sense for what different types of knowledge workers. It's probably the single most aggressive firm on this kind of personal dimension.
UBIQUITY: Tell us now about the other types of intervention are.
DAVENPORT: First, there are interventions into the physical workplace. The frustrating thing about this one is that we do these interventions every day but we don't really learn anything because we don't do any measurements.
UBIQUITY: Example?
DAVENPORT: We move people from closed offices to open offices, or we move them into shared-office "hoteling" environments, or we tell them to work at home instead of coming into the office; in fact, we typically change multiple things at once, and we give them a new manager and new computer stuff and change the office kind of all at the same time. So we have not a clue about what's effective and what's not. A good example of creative workplace design is a place like IDEO, which basically offers free choice about what you want your workspace to look like. You're given your little area and if you want to bring in an airplane wing because you think it's got a really inspiring design and will help you be a better product designer, that's just fine with IDEO, as long as you can find a way to fix it to the ceiling so it won't fall on anybody. It uses a "mass-personalized" solution, which combines a group work setting low on segmentation (all employees share the same standard group work setting), but high on individual choice (employees are encouraged to bring in their own creative accoutrements to supplement the group solution).
More
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