People-focused knowledge management

Work Is Becoming Increasingly Complex and Valuable
Work is changing, and so is the workplace. Apart from increased
work complexity, the workplace itself is equipped with sophisticated
work-aids that often take considerable understanding to handle and
exploit. Work-aids include IT-based infrastructure capabilities and
task-specific aids such as mathematical analysis models, knowledge
bases (KBs), and work guides for complicated work processes. There
are increases in communications support for e-mail and groupware
capabilities. With some communications capabilities, many people
find that their normal work is frequently interrupted and that such
disruptions make it difficult to perform their work as intended. Given
these and other changes, effective work requires that people must
have greater proficiency to deliver the quality expected. Workers need
to possess — or have access to — knowledge in different ways, such
as through collaboration, expert networks, or communities of 
practice (CoPs).
Some knowledge may be routine, tacit, and automatized; other
knowledge may be tacit at higher abstraction levels; yet other knowl-
edge may be accessed via computers or consultation with colleagues.
People must deliver proficient work in spite of interruptions, they
must be able to take advantage of complicated work-aids, and they
must be capable of innovating and improvising when customized
demands require it. More importantly, they must integrate their work
with adjacent functions and departments, include interdisciplinary
perspectives and expertise where required, and understand how 
they, as individuals, teams, or departments assist in implementing
enterprise goals, objectives, and strategy. Workers at all levels, to the
extent that they affect outcomes, must also understand customer
requirements regarding quality, service supports, and many con-
tractual aspects such as delivery or inventory conditions. In the 
Tayloristic
2
era, these considerations were not important but have
become increasingly significant.
Workers on the assembly line — be it in an aircraft factory, food
plant, or computer company — are constantly making small tradeoff
decisions that affect quality, rework and costs, or speed of delivery.
Within a work day, each individual will face many different tradeoff
challenges of varying degrees that cannot be foreseen and therefore
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cannot be planned for in advance. From managerial perspectives,
assembly work may look routine, but it actually contains complexi-
ties that must be resolved competently to implement the desired
enterprise direction.
Continued progress and improvements have led to a continued
increase in supplier capability and efficiency. This trend is energized
by customer demands for better and less expensive goods and ser-
vices and stronger competitors. As indicated in Figure 1-2, these
changes result in more complex work. Complexity results from the
need to deliver ever higher quality and better customized products
and services — to customers and, increasingly, colleagues and down-
stream business processes within the enterprise itself. Competent
delivery of complex work products requires additional knowledge —
greater abstract understanding and, in many cases, totally new
knowledge. Whereas better knowledge is important, it cannot by
itself deliver the desired performance. Information technology and
structural intellectual capital (IC) such as systems and procedures,
business models, management and operational practices, and orga-
nization of work, all contribute to effective delivery of complex work,
as does worker motivation.
In Figure 1-2 the changes in work complexity are indicated as a
frequency diagram where work is divided into six categories, from
simple to complex. A fair amount of traditional work (“past work”)
tends to have relatively low complexity levels. For this reason it is
possible to replace some people-work with intelligent automation
that gradually takes over routine work such as payroll, inventory
control, and commodity purchasing, thus leaving workers free to deal
with more demanding challenges.
For organizations to just “stay in the game” in competitive and
productive terms, it is essential that activities in categories 1, 2, and
3 be automated as far as possible. They should at least be embodied
in the structural IC of the organization. This is the focus of many
KM-IT activities today. However, as should by now be obvious, KM-
IT systems are merely quicker ways to address yesterday’s business
challenges since KM-IT, for the most part, only automates what has
been well known from past experiences. In general, it is not possible
to automate new challenging work about which we still are learning
and do not fully know how to handle. On the other hand, today’s
routine work is often work that was complex yesterday. Such change
requires human intelligence and mental capabilities such as concep-
tual blending, as we will discuss in Chapter 5.
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Enterprises ask employees to undertake increasingly complex work
by changing job descriptions and service paradigms (see Chapter 7).
To deliver competent work, employees at all levels not only need to
have task knowledge, but also need to understand their new respon-
sibilities in the broader organizational context. Placing improved
operational knowledge at the point-of-action leads to reduced costs
and an effort to deliver routine work — work is executed quicker
with fewer problems. To obtain the desired effectiveness in more
complex situations, a person’s job-related understanding must be
increased by building additional concepts and mental models in the
forms of scripts and schemata to metaknowledge.
3
An example of work displacement and resulting nano-
productivity gain is found among oil refinery operators.
4
Advanced
computer control has automated most normal and many abnormal
operations, leaving operators with new responsibilities. Operators
are asked to seek out better operating conditions, anticipate and
understand upstream changes and disturbances, diagnose emerging
problems, decide how to handle them, carry out compensating
actions, and monitor the effectiveness of their interventions with an
eye on how to continue operating the process in the best way. The
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