Search Done Right

The definition of Knowledge Worker seriously needs updating, so that corporations can best figure out how to enhance knowledge-work productivity. In particular, it needs a good tie-in to search, which is becoming the dominant means to leverage prior knowledge. Here’s the Knowledge Worker entry from Wikipedia as of today:

“Knowledge worker, a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959, is one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace.”

“Develops and uses”? Most knowledge workers don’t develop knowledge as a main activity, or even at all. Instead, they seek out - or search for - knowledge developed by others.

Is Wikipedia an anomaly? Here are a couple of other definitions, among many:

“A knowledge worker is anyone who works for a living at the tasks of developing or using knowledge.” (techtarget.com)

“Knowledge workers have high degree of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution, or application of knowledge.” (Prof. Thomas H. Davenport, in chapter 1 of his book Thinking for a Living. Also see an interview by Allan Alter in CIO Insight.)

Since the idea of knowledge worker was first developed in the 1950’s, it’s understandable that there is no emphasis on seeking out information as a main task of the knowledge worker’s everyday workflow.

However, observing how knowledge workers actually spend their (our) day, and realizing that creating knowledge is often much harder than seeking it out, the emphasis should be on “seeking, creating, distributing, and applying knowledge.”

Of course, in some cases it’s faster to create knowledge rather than search for it. For example, if I’m writing a very small computer program or script, it’s easier to write it from scratch rather than scour the world for it. The tradeoffs involved require a longer discussion, but it’s clear that searching for information is a critical part of today’s knowledge worker.

For clarity of thinking, let’s modernize the definition. Then organizations can invest appropriately in ways to enhance each task, including investing wisely in enterprise search for seeking out knowledge.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.