Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Knowledge Worker Overload
byThe term ”knowledge worker” is one of those phrases many would assume had its genesis in the digital age, but it was originally coined by prolific economics and business author Peter Drucker way back in 1959. Wikipedia’s definition of knowledge worker is “one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace.” It has been nearly fifty years since Drucker created the term, and now that the Industrial Age has transformed even more into the Information Age, knowledge workers are everywhere.
While technology has made it easier to share information, it has also made prodigious amounts of information available to almost everyone. Before the Internet, part of the biggest challenge a knowledge worker faced was finding information in the first place. Today the biggest challenge is knowing what information to exclude. Between emails, Web sites, databases, spreadsheets, reports, studies, RSS readers, meetings (that are too often an inefficient form of information sharing), and traditional media sources, we are often overwhelmed with information.
A recent study, “The Hidden Cost of Information Work,” released by International Data Corporation (IDC), reveals the average knowledge worker spends over 14 hours per week reading and answering email, 13 hours creating documents, almost 10 hours a week analyzing information, 9 hours searching for information, and another 9 hours editing/reviewing information. If anyone is doing the math, that adds up to 55 hours per week per knowledge worker for these five categories alone! This doesn’t leave a lot of time for other things at work needing attention that are in the “none of the above” category. The study was based on 600 participants in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and government organizations.
People will have to adapt, and systems will have to evolve to handle this information glut. Only so much data and other inputs can be processed into knowledge. Enterprise systems have matured (or degenerated) into incredibly sophisticated information aggregators, but they have become so big and complicated they are creating their own knowledge crisis just learning to utilize and understand their complexities.
Human beings have a built-in defense mechanisms when overwhelmed with information. We shut off what we don’t need to know. The TV remote might have a wealth of buttons, but we only use a few of those to get where we want to go on the tube. Microsoft Word is feature rich, but most knowledge workers only access a fraction of the program’s capabilities. And so it goes. There is no other choice because information increases while time remains fixed.
With the amount of information available, we need to stop looking for all the right answers, and instead, ask the right questions to refine our attention. Knowledge management must become selective to evolve. The difficulties of becoming a useful generalist in an organization are inversely proportional to the increasing amounts of total information (and knowledge) that are obtainable. Of course, even if knowledge workers become more specialized in defining information horizons, we all still need a way to collaborate and share our spheres of information with others in the organization.
Dave Pollard has done a great job of explaining some viable new options for knowledge management in an extensive post last week on his blog. Pollard points out that one of the reasons knowledge workers in many organizations have not been empowered to fulfill their potential, is because the new tools of collaboration (many of these fortified by Web 2.0 development) involve a decentralizing of the decision-making and control process. This is seen by the more myopic or risk-adverse in management as a diminution of power and control—thus the resistance to needed change.
On a personal level, attempts to keep up with all the information available nowadays might seem impossible. According to Kathy Sierra at the Creating Passionate Users blog, it is impossible, and she offers a number of suggestions to reduce the information anxiety and help concentrate on what really matters. The irony is that many people feel more information will enable their decision-making process when, in fact, too many choices and information overload can instead lead to procrastination or decision paralysis.
Something has to give. Information fuels our economy and that information is increasing at an exponential rate. Unless we find better ways to integrate knowledge management into companies, most organizations and knowledge workers will be operating far below their potential.
