260,000 Documents? Take Them One at aTime

It sounds counterintuitive, but is it possible that "knowledge workers" (that would be us) need more supervision than they're getting, not less?  So proposes Thomas Davenport, professor of IT and management at Babson College (in Wellesley, Mass.) and head of the executive education program there. 

In his new book "Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers" (Harvard Business School Press, July 2005), Davenport says that the classic strategy of "hiring good people and leaving them alone" is no longer good enough, if it ever was.  What, then, do knowledge workers need by way of help?

The answer matters, if, as I, you are a lifelong admirer of Peter Drucker and take to heart his counsel that the single most important determinant of economic performance in the 21st Century will be maximizing the productivity of knowledge workers.  To make knowledge workers more productive, most turned first to Knowledge Management.  The concept seems unassailable:  Don't reinvent the wheel, distribute best practices, find the expert quickly, etc.  

But the results of the first generation of KM tools were, as all can now admit, disappointing.  What went wrong?  "Most organizations simply created one big repository for all knowledge and all workers."  Stating it so baldly constitutes a diagnosis of the problem.  For example, at Partners HealthCare System, an organization of Harvard teaching hospitals in the Boston area, the challenge was how to keep doctors and other health professionals current given that some 260,000 articles a year are added to the biomedical literature every year.  The answer?  To target the doctor with the pertinent article at the very moment it's germane.  So if he's writing a prescription for twice-daily Lipitor, the system lets him know a once-a-day dose is now available, and therapeutically recommended. 

Isn't this high degree of granularity time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to pull off?  Yes, which is why Davenport admits he likes the example of Partners HealthCare because he hasn't found too many others like it. 

But in a law firm we don't add 260,000 documents a year to our repository—certainly nowhere near if you count only documents that have some intrinsic material value past their "due by" date.  Would it be feasible for a firm committed to a fine-tuned, "bottom up" KM system to deliver pertinent information in a more targeted manner?   Absolutely—and it will only get better over time.

By now we all know the real problem with KM is not technology, it's culture.  So I was happy to see Davenport endorse what I have long believed is the single most important "cultural" (psychological, motivational) thing KM has going for it in the eyes of hyper-analytic, competitive, super-verbal lawyers:  The desire to become a more capable and expert professional. 

"I have yet to meet a knowledge worker who isn't interested in making him or herself better. Knowledge workers take pride in what they do, and they want to be productive."

Maybe giving them KM tools with clear career and professional benefits is the answer after all.