Knowledge Workers are the Emerging Heroes of the Digital World
Blog: Jim Sinur
Organizations will be asking much more of the knowledge worker as the 21st century progresses. Routine work will be highly automated and optimized leaving the difficult work for knowledge workers to sort out. This work will consist of dealing with demanding interfacing with customers that are on their own journey with fickle loyalty, looking at emerging patterns, making wise decisions in context while predicting reactions to potential actions and taking efficient actions while satisfying customers at faster speeds than ever in a dynamic environment. This makes the knowledge worker at the operational, tactical and strategic levels the super heroes of the digital world. As we all know, super heroes are super heroes because of their character and special powers and assists. Our digital super heroes will have supreme interaction skills, incisive powers of great decisions and the wise actions of a sage appropriate for the intersections of many contexts. The new digital world will not only assist the knowledge workers like the utility belts and tools of super heroes, but guide knowledge workers to successful outcomes under a number of dynamic conditions at warp speed.
The way work is managed today is that any one business event is taken through all the specialties it needs to achieve completion. In fact, today’s societies engender the creation of narrow skill bands so that workers can get better at achieving the same task using the same skills over and over until they reach perfection or dronish boredom. This leads to dissatisfaction of the worker and consequently dissatisfied customers having to deal with multiple uncoordinated stacks of specialized skills to get their desired outcomes. Nearly every great organization wants to be known for customer care, but companies are fundamentally organized in a way that defeats great customer care. Sure you can train your employees to treat people better. Sure you can enable technology to sense the mood of the customer. Sure you can have better mobile interfaces and feedback mechanisms to please customers. These are all great steps. However, if you force clients to traverse your departments because of your division of labor, you are starting in a hole and working your way back out of it to neutral. Divide and conquer is an old strategy that has spread beyond usefulness and its time. Yes, we need specialties, but let the technology do most of the specialty work.
The industrial revolution ushered in the notion of specialties because people were more productive, if you only gave them a few tasks to get great at over time. Well when people were dependent on their own knowledge and skills, this made perfect sense. Over time people became smarter and the work splits stayed pretty much the same. This made sense back in the 1800s and the early 1900s, but we are way past that in our abilities as a collective society. No wonder labor unions emerged. Besides organizational abuse, we introduced boredom in the work place. I understand that only special people could be generalists back then, but there is no longer any excuse for keeping this old paradigm the dominant way to organize. It’s time to start the incremental transformation to real digital assisted generalists. With digital assists knowledge workers will be able to do the following in better ways. The new digital world will assist knowledge workers:
The knowledge worker will be the key resources in the digital age, but the knowledge worker will be made to be a super hero with all sorts of assists from many swarming agents of recognition, knowledge extension, decisions assistance and action enablement. The utility belt in the digital world will be filled with many weapons of assistance to reach organizational outcomes that are consistent with dynamic changing goals.
With Connection Across Specialties
With Impossible Work Streams
With Awareness to Omniscience
With Decision Making to Better Precision
With Supercharging Cognition & Knowledge for Results
With Predictive Powers to Intercept the Future
With Actions to Reach Desired Outcomes
Net; Net:
The knowledge worker will be the key resources in the digital age, but the knowledge worker will be made to be a super hero with all sorts of assists from many swarming agents of recognition, knowledge extension, decisions assistance and action enablement. The utility belt in the digital world will be filled with many weapons of assistance to reach organizational outcomes that are consistent with dynamic changing goals.
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