News Feature

Knowledge Workers: Improving Their Processes

By Tom Davenport

June 01, 2003 — CIO — I’ve just coauthored a book on new ideas in business. (It’s called What’s the Big Idea? Only $29.95. Operators are standing by for your call.) As a result, people keep asking, "So what’s the next big thing?" Mind you, I missed e-commerce and the Internet, so I could easily be wrong. But I’m betting one particular idea will succeed in the next few years, and the nice editors at CIO are going to let me write several columns about it.

This big idea involves knowledge work and knowledge workers, and the technologies they use to do their jobs. My thesis begins with first identifying who a knowledge worker is and (especially) who a knowledge worker isn’t. They’re the people who, as a primary aspect of their work, create knowledge, share it with others, or apply it in decisions and actions. By my classification of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, we have about 36 million of them in the United States alone—that’s close to 30 percent of the working population. Think of knowledge workers as the horses that pull the plow in sophisticated economies—they’re the research scientists, the IT architects, the strategic planners, the doctors, the lawyers, the Indian chiefs. Then consider where we would be in terms of innovation, science, management, marketing and high-level services without them. Nowhere.

But how have we treated these invaluable human resources? Have we given them the attention they deserve? Have they been the focus of our best efforts at process improvement, the design of effective work environments, and the studied application of information technology? Hardly. We have done little to help our economy’s most valuable capability (and I’ll elaborate in later columns on the various domains of scandalous inaction).

Now, I’m no Marxist; but you can never discount the importance of class structure. Knowledge workers as a class "own the means of production." They have largely escaped systematic scrutiny because they don’t really have the desire to turn the analytical lens on themselves. Knowledge workers don’t like to be told what to do; heck, they don’t even like to be told that there is a common structure and flow to their work. Their work is more variable and unpredictable than production or administrative work, so if you do want to understand it, you have to look hard and long. Much of what they do is invisible—it takes place inside the human brain. Eliciting how a doctor makes a diagnosis or how an investment analyst chooses a stock has never been easy. And finally, some of these groups of workers have their own equivalent of unions—professional associations—that have successfully resisted encroachment from the outside.