By Oscar Berg, Future Office Evangelist
April 08, 2010 - 4:54 PM
When talking about Enterprise 2.0, I often use the quote below by Steel baron Andrew Carnegie, founder and owner of the Carnegie Steel Company - the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world in the 1890’ies:
"The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it."
Andrew Carnegie truly understood that individuals do not create wealth by themselves. He knew that an enterprise is about collaboration, and how important it is for people to do it well if the enterprise is to do well.
Today, with organizations operating on a global scale in an increasingly connected, complex and rapidly changing world, efficient and effective collaboration and knowledge exchange is even more important than it was a century ago. Jobs primary consisting of knowledge work typically make up 25 to 50 percent of the workforce - in some industries a lot more – and for many employees today, collaborative and complex problem solving is the essence of their work.
Traditionally, organizations have boosted their productivity by improving the efficiency of transformational and transactional activities. The last few decades, most of the improvements made have relied on the use of information technologies as a means to automate the manual work involved in transactional processes. But what about improving knowledge work? Consideringthe typical daily situation of a knowledge worker, there must be great potential to improve knowledge work:
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It is hard for her to find out who knows what – especially in a new context.
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The only way she can to rapidly share ideas with co-workers is to send email.
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There are too many places to look for information and she might not even have access to the ones that contain the information she needs.
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She constantly has check for new updates and spend a lot of time and energy on looking for information and answers
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She does not know what is happening at the office when she is not physically present
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She has to spend a lot of time trying to add value, waiting for other people to tell her when it her turn to contribute.
Let’s instead try to envision a more productive environment for knowledge worker:
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She is well connected with co-workers, customers and partners
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It takes her a second to share anything with virtually anyone
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She has one point of entry to the information she is looking for
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She does not worry looking for what has changed since information about what has changed automatically comes to her
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She has instant access to both people and information
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She knows what goes on in your network and when to move things forward
In order to boost the productivity of knowledge workers, employees need to be empowered to become more effective and efficient at what they do. That is something completely different than reducing the headcount, making people redundant. Simply put, we need much more human-centered approaches and strategies than the ones we have used when aiming to increase the efficiency of transformational and transactional activities. We need to create a work environment that empowers individuals. Organizations can learn a lot from the social web in this respect.
On the web today, people from across the world can quickly team up and collaborate – to borrow the words of Clay Shirky – “with a birthday party's informality and a multinational's scope”. Anyone can become a publisher, with the ability to reach a global audience. Anyone can connect with anyone at any time and place to exchange information, ideas, and experiences – and do something together.
The practices, tools and technologies which have made all this possible are now inevitably entering the workplace as people dealing with knowledge work discover that they empower them to get better at doing their jobs. The key question organizations have to address regarding this development is whether they should just passively let it happen, if they should try to prevent the changes from affecting their organization, or if they should actively support it and try to take it to their advantage. Regardless of which strategy they choose for themselves, they first need try to understand the change and the impact it has for their specific organization.
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