Tom Davenport’s Working Knowledge was the classic knowledge management book of the 1990s. Whenever someone asked me for a good introduction to KM, I always recommended this book. I believe that his latest book, Thinking for a Living, is destined to become the classic knowledge management book of the 2000s and the one I recommend now. It covers work he has been developing for some time. The book operates at the intersection of knowledge management and process improvement, two disciplines where Tom has greatly contributed. Warren Bennis beat me to this conclusion when he said that Thinking for a Living “will soon become the classic work on knowledge management.” I think it earns this accolade because it goes beyond managing knowledge to enabling knowledge workers to become more productive. It speaks to the original promise of knowledge management, empowering workers with the ability to make better business decisions.
I heard Tom speak on the thinking for a living at KM World before I had a chance to read the complete work. The talk fueled my interest and I then read the book, itself. Tom acknowledges that knowledge workers are very difficult to manage, just as some people have said that knowledge management, itself, is an oxymoron. But the rewards are great as they make up a third of all workers and they make the largest financial impact. Going beyond the common theme of “hiring smart people and leaving them alone,” Tom argues that taking part of the knowledge creation and application process out of a “black box” and making it more apparent and structured can provide benefits. However, you need to approach it differently than traditional process improvement. First, you need to involve the knowledge workers in the creation of this structured process and you need to allow for practice, as well as process. In other words, you need to give knowledge workers to the tools to make smart decisions and not take those decisions away by scripting the work. This enlightened approach leads to integrating knowledge into the job, not merely simplifying work.
When I first became aware of knowledge management in 1993, it was through developing a system for property casualty insurance underwriters at Cigna that fits Tom’s approach. These underwriters were pleased to be involved in standardizing the decision process and steps because they were involved in creating the process. They most resisted an automated decision system and responded best to getting access to documented knowledge and contacts to experts to better enable them to practice their craft and make better decisions at each stage of this new process. This effort was documented as a Harvard Business School case.
The Cigna work occurred in the beginning days of KM and before the term had reached us. The underwriting process was essentially broken. Working with Cigna experts, we first re-designed the underwriting process. Property casualty insurance is very knowledge-intensive (e.g. risks at movie theaters are different than those for drag racers). We then re-designed the applications that supported these processes. Balanced scorecard measures where developed around these key business processes and applications were designed to support these measures. A system was set up to monitor performance on these measures across the different divisions.
In this effort we also turned the existing relationship of underwriters to IT on its head. They had traditionally viewed underwriting applications as an evil imposed by the central office to check up on them and to be avoided if possible. We went out to the field offices to ask users what they wanted. This was a novel idea to them and really energized support for the knowledge management system and the new approach. Positive emails began circulating about how the central office was now listening to their needs.
Instead of building applications around central office needs, we linked application support to the new process we co-designed with the underwriters and they applauded this change. Next, we thought it would be useful to provide connections to the documented expertise on each market niche (again, think movie theaters vs. drag racers) as well as the identified company experts on these niche markets at each step within the process application. This concept was popular and we created a series of process focused "desktops" for underwriting, claims, and sale support that linked knowledge management with process applications through a Visual Basic front end linked to DB2. Part way though the effort, the term “knowledge management” began to appear in the market press. So we said, “Hey, that’s what we're doing” and changed our descriptions from “performance support” to “knowledge management.” The fortunes of this division greatly increased and it was later sold at a profit of billions. We called this effort knowledge management, but others used the term for document repositories disconnected from the work process. It is great to see a thoughtful and practical work that takes knowledge management in the right direction.
I first heard Tom speak on the topic of personal knowledge management as a key note speaking at a KM Cluster meeting in Cambridge in January 2005, while he was still writing the book. At that time Tom listed blogs as one of the several time wasters for knowledge workers. After his talk, I pointed out the potential for personal knowledge management that blogs offered. Tom makes references to this conversation in the book and allows that blogs may be an effective means for managing one’s personal knowledge. He says that, “if this particular use (PKM) of blogs caught on broadly, it could represent a new approach to organizational knowledge management (p. 108)”. However, he still has reservations for the business value of blogs if they are simply a means for personal expression. Tom does not address the use of blogs for marketing communication but he recently began to contribute, with others, to a blog, Babson Knowledge, for his Babson Executive Education. It is great source for new thoughts on knowledge management.
I highly recommend Thinking for a Living. It should be read by everyone interested in knowledge management and knowledge workers.
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