Knowledge Work - We're Going to Win This War After All

There was a time, not so long ago, when one of my colleagues - a smart man who was a serious student of philosophy and was himself what I could only characterize as "deeply philosophical" - moved over into information management. He become a specialist librarian, had something of a career in that field, and was (by the time I knew him) teaching in a graduate LIS program.

On many occasions we had great discussions about the role of the knowledge professional in corporate and organizational effectiveness, and despite the strength of my argument or my passion about the knowledge professional as knowledge thought leader for the organization, my friend was always quick to make a point - almost any point - by saying, "Just give it up. The engineers have won."

He meant that the battle - as many described it in those days - between the people who build the pipelines and the people who manage the content was lost. The IT community was going to always be in control, according to the conventional wisdom, and nobody really cared about the opinions and leadership of the people who managed, advised about, and shared content.

He was wrong. My friend was dead wrong.

We now know that that time in the history of knowledge management, knowledge services, and the knowledge worker was just a skirmish, not even a battle. It was just a period of time that we had to wait out, to be patient about while the rest of the world caught up with us.

I always knew it, of course. Not that I could have predicted what the outcome would be. I'm not that smart, and there's no way I could have predicted things like SaaS, remote data centers, social networking media, and all the myriad other products and tools that enable such strong communication nowadays. I knew it because it was the way things worked. In every encounter I had, having to do with information management, knowledge management, or strategic learning - those three elements that merge together to make up what we refer to as "knowledge services" - it was always a collaborate effort. It was always the engineers and the content people working together (in the successful efforts, that is) and while some of us were perhaps anxious to "push" the process toward one end of the spectrum or the other, that's not what happened.

And look where we've come.

I'm impressed to see Dan Holtshouse's lead article in the current KMWorld. In "The Future of Knowledge Workers," Holtshouse writes about research into long-term trends that demonstrates how companies and organizations are preparing to leverage "the best of the knowledge workers of the future."

OK. Perhaps I'm a little bit pollyanny-ish here, but reading what Holtshouse writes sends me a very clear message. The battle between the "engineers" and the "content people" is long over. Now, according to the research he describes, companies are preparing proactively for the future, with managers giving serious attention to how to retain knowledge that would be lost during retirements. And they are recruiting aggressively for high-quality knowledge workers (or outsourcing knowledge management), and among those who are recruiting the best people to come into their own shop, their top recruiting strategy, according to Holtshouse, turns out to be "an emphasis on flex telework/telecommute programs that reflect the era of the mobile work force." Equally important in effective recruiting for knowledge workers (why are we not surprised?) is an "emphasis on opportunities for personal growth through mentoring/coaching programs, advanced degree support, and integrated life/work programs."

Well said, Dan Holtshouse. I think we can now put away our "fears" (if that's what they were) about IT "taking over" or KM functioning as a separate, stand-alone management methodology. We're all in this together, and now that organizational management recognizes that fact, organizational effectiveness and success are closer that we ever thought.

Connecting Drucker's "Meaningful Outside" to Knowledge Services

With management and service delivery responsibility for knowledge services, the organization's knowledge services director has a unique two-sided role to play. On the one hand, this person is the knowledge thought leader for the entire enterprise, with all the innovation-directed and future planning pressure that goes with that role. On the other hand, as the manager of the knowledge services business unit, however it is structured in the larger organization, this manager must ensure that information, knowledge, and strategic learning products and services are delivered as required. It's a challenging task, this business of being two things at once.

And part of the challenge is defining the "audience" (we might call it) for the knowledge services work. Who benefits?

Peter Drucker might have provided us with an answer. Or at least with a provocative way of thinking about the people we're trying to reach.

One of Drucker's concepts, discussed last night among the participants at a meeting of The Drucker Society of New York City, is the role of the CEO in linking between what Drucker referred to as the Inside - i.e., "the organization" - and the Outside, all those external infuences that drive our work. And why is it important to make that distinction? Drucker answered that in an article in The Wall Street Journal in 2004 ("Management Today: The American CEO" - December 30, 2004): "Inside, there are only costs. Results are only on the outside."

Well, of course. And it's the results we're after, isn't it, as we seek to use knowledge services to ensure that the company is functioning as a knowledge culture? So how do we arrive at that "meaningful Outside" Drucker wrote about and apply those principles to knowledge services?

For the knowledge services director, it is important to recognize that there are two "Outsides." Thinking in terms of the larger enterprise, that Outside can be described as Drucker described it: "society, the economy, technology, markets, customers, the media, pubic opinion." For the knowledge services business unit - whether it is a research department, a specialized library, a knowledge center, or any of a variety of other business units providing knowledge services - the Outside is everybody and everything affiliiated with the company for which knowledge services are provided.

There are many, many practical applications that can be used to demonstrate how these Outsides become "meaningful," and we can look at a couple. And they apply - going back to the conundrum posed in the first paragraph - whether I'm doing my job as enterprise-wide knowledge thought leader or as the manager of a single, specific, knowledge-focused business unit.

For example, we can identify at least one element of Drucker's "Outside" for providing "meaningful" results if we have built, say, an expertise database (for the company or for an individual business unit) and we are able to monitor how many people - outside the domain of the knowledge services business unit - are working with this tool without being directed to it or shown how to use it by the knowledge services staff. The users are "outside" my realm of responsibility but how they use the tool provided by my business unit is meaningful, telling me much about my success. And I'm doing the same thing Drucker's CEO is doing, I'm serving as the link between my unit's Outside (the larger enterprise) and the Inside (the knowledge services business unit and its staff).

Another example might be on a less specific level, to think about the effect or impact of some action I take without having a measurable result in hand. As the knowledge thought leader, one of my jobs is to give attention to how people act differently in the workplace after they have been exposed to or participated in some initiative from my unit. If it's the result we are looking for, what might be the result after several weeks (months? years?) of working with staff in team-building situations, working with them in programs and learning activities relating specifically to knowledge sharing or in activities having to do with a project focus that is not especially knowledge related? It all boils down to the same thing, doesn't it? The impact or the effect is an organizational ambiance in which team work is expected, trust is a given, and collegiality is built into the process. It might not be a result that can be measured in quite the same way as the number of hits in an expertise database but it is, nevertheless, a result to be desired and sought after.

Thinking About... The Knowledge Thought Leader

If knowledge workers aspire to be knowledge thought leaders for the organizations in which they are employed, how do they go about it? Is there a list of qualifications or attributes that define the knowledge thought leader?

It's no struggle to find a few. Simply by defining the terms we can move forward in identifying some of the attributes of a knowledge thought leader. First of all, as someone once wrote (Peter Drucker?), a leader is someone who has followers, so perhaps a quick way to define a knowledge thought leader is to look around. In terms of KM/knowledge services/managing the organization as a knowledge culture, who's being listened to? Who is the "go-to" person for issues, questions, intellectually provocative conversations relating to KM and knowledge services? Is there such a person who can be identified (if there isn't I would question the organization's commitment to the value of knowledge in organizational effectiveness - if knowledge isn't being shared, I'm not sure knowledge is important to the company)?

A second attribute might be visibility. Not speaking about popularity here. Lots of folks are popular but you wouldn't go to them for guidance when you have a question about how to handle a particular knowledge development/knowledge sharing (KD/KS) situation. A knowledge leader is probably known to a lot of people as just that, a recognized leader in the organization who is known for his or her skill in managing knowledge-related situations.

If you were looking (all other things being equal) to identify the perfect knowledge thought leader for your company or organization, what would you be looking for? What do you define a knowledge thought leaders?