Tom Davenport was the opening keynote speaker at the recent KM World. He talked about ways to make knowledge workers more productive using research form his new book, Thinking for a Living. Tom started with some thoughts on Peter Drucker who recently passed away. He recalled an interview he did with Drucker where he asked him what he thought of knowledge management. Peter replied that he was not sure that knowledge could be managed. So Tom said he quickly changed the subject.
Tom found that most companies’ approach to knowledge workers is to spend a lot of energy in the hiring process to get smart people and then they largely leave them alone, trying to stay out of their way. He feels that knowledge work can be measured and improved with some structured interventions. But he also cautioned that there are different types of knowledge workers which require different interventions. For example, a process approach can work well for software engineers, civic engineers, drug clinical trails, and certain health care protocols. It does not work for finding oil and gas, executive management, drug development, and academia.
It is important to have the knowledge workers participate in the design of any processes they will use and to have only part of the work covered by a process approach, leaving them some latitude. This approach was what we used in my first knowledge management effort at Cigna property insurance in the early 90s. There we used star underwriters to design a process where none existed and then linked KM to each step in the process, providing both relevant documents and access to appropriate experts and peers. At the same time we did not script what the underwriters did as there would have been massive resistance. Instead, we simply provided them what they needed to make intelligent decisions, including access to experts in all the niche markets they had to deal with. Here knowledge was embedded in the work. It was my initial introduction to knowledge management and we did it before we learned of the term. I was disappointed to later see a lot of KM efforts end up as simply collecting documents.
Tom also mentioned the British Telcom call center work that I was connected with in London in the early 2000s. It followed a similar approach as what we did at Cigna by embedding KM in the work process. Call centers offer one of the best venues for process oriented KM. It was at a large US telcom that I found one of the best documented ROIs for KM. Here we could easily segment callas hwere the rep used the KM system and those where it was not used. When the KM system was used the cross sell rate was three times that on calls where it was not used. When KM was used, there were fewer escalations to supervisor, and fewer repeat calls, along with positive results on a number of other measures that had large financial implications. This ability to have clear measures is another reason that call centers make great situations to embed KM in the work process.
I look forward to reading the book. I see that Tom is part of a blog now with Larry Prusak and others, Babson Knowledge.
Bill,
I found Tom Davenport's comments very interesting also. He got me interested in personal productivity as a means of KM. It was great to see your presentations and others at KM World that talked more about this. This seemed to be a new theme this year.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Oxenford | November 28, 2005 at 03:51 PM