Search Done Right

Every organization employs individuals, whose main responsibility is gathering, evaluating, creating and sharing knowledge throughout their organization.  They are the knowledge workers.  Within consulting companies the knowledge worker makes up around 90% of the workforce, in manufacturing they might comprise 30-40% of the overall workforce.  Regardless of the percentage, there is always an initiative around knowledge workers to better understand their role and increase their overall utilization.

Since Peter Drucker first coined the term “knowledge worker,” organizations continue to ask the same questions:

1. How do we increase the productivity of the knowledge worker?
2. How do we quantify the value added that knowledge workers deliver to our organization?
3. Who is responsible for monitoring and evaluating the valued add of the knowledge worker?
4. What tools does the knowledge worker need to be effective?
5. How do you retain the knowledge created by the knowledge worker within the organization even after that individual has left or retired?

Procter & Gamble often considered a leader in innovation continues to re-invent their culture around the knowledge worker.  Recently, they have introduced social networking into their enterprise.  In a CIO Magazine article they claim that with their new application “a 150-person, geographically disbursed work group came together in two months rather than in six to 12.”  They have also publicly spoken about their deployment of enterprise search as a tool for improving knowledge worker productivity and overall discovery.  Despite P&G’s public acknowledgment, as well as many others investing in knowledge workers, organizations still struggle with the right level of investment and how to quantify the return on that investment.

Often the struggle can be contributed to the question “Who is responsible for the productivity of these workers?”  Without knowing who owns the productivity it becomes even more challenging to identify the areas that will increase productivity.  If you ask individual workers many believe a lighter laptop or a mobile phone is the key to increase productivity.   Few will identify more strategic initiatives to help eliminate duplicate effort, increase usability of knowledge or account for the risk of losing data when individuals leave an organization.  It begins to raise the question then who is the buyer of information management technologies such as social networking and enterprise search whose focus often is around increasing the value added of each individual knowledge worker.

Forrester has announced a new study around this very topic of understanding the technology needs of the information worker.  As Forrester points out in their blog, understanding the individual needs of the information worker is not an easy question to answer and often the answer requires research and is custom for each organization.

What are your thoughts around the knowledge workers in your enterprise?  Will investing in increased productivity, knowledge capture and re-usability of information improve your bottom line?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 7:52 am 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.