Welcome to the Information Age
The Information Age had its start in the early 1980s with the break-up of the Bell System and AT&T, a move that led to a competitive telecoms environment that was able to build the commercial Internet that is somewhat taken for granted today.
This communications revolution has brought with it myriad changes in how work is done. While as recently as five years ago, much knowledge work was relatively solitary, today knowledge workers expect to be able to tap into a variety of resources – be they people, information, tools, or the collective knowledge of an organization – when doing their work.
One thing that has changed is the recognition that knowledge workers (sometimes referred to as information workers) are the lynchpins of the Information Age. Ironically, many of the tools that support knowledge work, while having acquired significant functionality, haven’t changed to better support new ways of working. What has to happen is nothing less than revolutionary; software needs to adapt to the new way of working collaboratively and software development needs to support this paradigm from the ground up.
In part, little has changed within the enterprise because we have yet to develop a management science for the knowledge economy that managers can apply in crafting strategy, designing products, managing people, and leveraging technology. It took a good 150 years from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution until the beginnings of a management science began to take shape. Today, we are in the first quarter century of the knowledge economy and all we can do is borrow the management science from the previous epoch and try to adapt it, an action somewhat akin to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and one resulting in great inefficiencies.
Taylorism, the management science of the industrial age first enunciated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, included standardizing work or replacing humans with machines and finding the “one best way” to perform tasks. Indeed, a 1974 article in the New York Times discussed how companies were following this course and turning offices into factories by splitting the traditional secretary’s job into two parts and sending some secretaries off to word processing centers to type documents and others to administrative support stations to file papers and answer phones.
It is clear today that such “improvements” were not appropriate for knowledge work and such attempts exemplify the fact that we still have a long way to go.
David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.
April 29th, 2010 22:11
It never ceases to amaze me how the wailing of arms and the gnashing of teeth continues about ‘management science’ and technology not fitting the bill nor having been developed to suit the circumstances of the modern age. The solution is so simple its mind-boggling to me how learned commentators keep missing the plot. When you consider the technologies that have been overwhelmingly successful since the start of the computing revolution you note that almost without exception the software which has taken tried and tested manual processes, mimicked them and then made them more efficient have delivered Sterling results. But when it comes to ‘knowledge workers’ there is seemingly no ‘starting point’ for their intellectual output to commence down the path of management in the same guise as you would commence a process in a previously manual system. That starting point is the management of knowledge worker ‘next actions’ and should commence within the context of the knowledge worker’s primary electronic habit (be it email or wherever). Once you have a logical starting point, natural intuitive cognition methodologies can be applied to the resulting ‘knowledge management’ system and hey presto – knowledge (however you define it!) is managed! So, find a starting point, use technology to provide a next management action decision making capability and you are on your way. David Allen knows this and explains why his methodology GTD, which is tool neutral, has the single largest constituency for next action management in the world today. My own organization understood this years ago in the context of email and Microsoft Outlook (born out of a lawyer’s need to make sense of the knowledge being produced day in and day out in a legal practice). As technologists have an engineering centric view of the world it is hardly surprising that they produce beautifully engineered software that most often fails to accommodate the cognitive orientation of non-technologists (the design of Outlook 2010 clearly demonstrates that if nothing changes nothing changes!) You could say, with the greatest of respect, that the loonies have been in charge of the asylum since the dawn of the computing revolution and THAT is why round pegs are trying to fit into square holes!
May 8th, 2010 08:36
I agree with David we have a long way to go in creating conditions to support knowledge workers. The recent rapid decline in the stock market is being investigated as potentially being caused by a “typo” when a trader might have entering a B for Billion rather than an M for Million. This is an example of the environment in which we work where we must make rapid decisions using technology and we fall prey to interruptions and distractions. The consequence of this environment is that HUMAN errors occur because we are not wired to think as fast as the technology we utilize.
Is the environment in which we work in the cause or is technnology the cause? Is the solution a human solution or a technology solution?
My independent research confirms David’s statement: “we have yet to develop a management science that managers can apply in crafting strategy, designing products, managing people, and leveraging technology.” I would add to that by saying we have yet to develop business practices that ORGANIZATIONS can apply to better manage priorities, projects, meetings, information, technology and people. It’s not that the business practices or management science is not there, it’s that it needs to be deployed with more DISCIPLINE.
It’s about working smarter not harder. It’s deciding when you don’t have the human capacity to take on another project. It’s deciding to NOT purchase a new software product because the product creates more work rather than less and the output is not worth the cost. It’s really all about being disciplined about how we manage or organizations.
May 9th, 2010 18:23
Lesa – bang on the money. Making decisions and applying discipline. People wired in the Send-Receive-File cognitive paradigm caused by the design of email software let emails pile up in their inboxes because they are not making decisions about their next actions (they graze their email and move on). Moreover, even in the wake of having made a decision, the majority of email users don’t apply any discipline in manipulating their email software to manage their resulting next actions because it takes too much discipline to do manually what email software should empower them to do programatically. This is why ‘email training’ simply doesn’t produce sustained results over the long haul. And let’s face it, if training really were the solution then the email overload nut would have been cracked 10 years ago!