Nickols: Knowledge Work is a Myth
Fred Nickols of Distance Consulting, and formerly of Educational Testing Service, was doing some house cleaning during December and dug up some thoughts on knowledge work. He's got a collection of other articles at his site too.
In Knowledge Work is a Myth (pdf), Nickols walks us through his thinking that all work has some component of knowledge to it, and therefore a separate category of "knowledge work" is unneccessary.
All work requires the worker to apply knowledge; all workers are therefore knowledge workers. For another [thing], most people are in the business of processing or producing knowledge albeit it mainly for their own use and consumption. Few people are in the business of processing and producing knowledge for commercial purposes.
Nickols has a point (and it has been made by others), but what I understand as knowledge work is exactly the idea that he seems to dismiss. Knowledge IS built into the things we buy and sell. Beyond the most repetitive work, everyone brings knowledge and skills to their jobs. It is that knowledge and those skills that must be used, refined, updated and applied to develop products for their employers. The point of focus on knowledge work is to make the knowledge more visible and support it. To remain competitive, organizations must continually assess and improve their knowledge base. To do this, it is much easier if this is visible, rather than hidden.
Jim McGee has an excellent essay on Knowlege Work as Craft Work and collection of thoughts on knowledge work for those that haven't seen these already.
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I agree with Bill's comment, and I think Nikols does too. His other article on the Challenge of Managing KW goes into this in more detail. Management processes need to be different depending on the type of work being done -- and the product of that work.
You can also check some helpful info in the field of- Tons of interesdting stuff!!!
In my knowledge management class last night, we covered the issue of knowledge work from many different angles. One of the topics that came up in our readings was a distinction between work and working (and workers). Lilia Efimova has just written som... Read More
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Perhaps this is accurate, but there _are_ specific differences between information workers that consume knowledge in the process of doing something and those that consume knowledge for the sole purpose of fabricating yet additional (or higher forms of) knowledge. A good example - an analyst that reads three Weblog posts, five newspaper articles, and two production reports to make a single annotation that references these sources. The annotation itself is a form of knowledge construction - something that not every information worker is tasked with.
In both cases, the knowledge 'consumers' are provided an added capacity to act by virtue of their informatio diets.
Can a Blog Post Contain Knowledge?
http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/item/10801