Work Smarter, Stupid

As "tacit" interactions replace more routine business activities and the scale and complexity of many corporations creep upward, the need to manage collaboration is growing. According to McKinsey, nearly 80 percent of the senior executives surveyed in a 2005 study said that effective coordination across product, functional, and geographic lines was crucial for growth. Yet only 25 percent of the respondents described their organizations as "effective" at sharing knowledge across boundaries.

Since the worth of a knowledge worker is what he/she knows or knows how to locate, there is a need to increase the pool of knowledge and sources in order to increase value. This relates to knowledge management as well--this is a corporate approach to identifying knowledge, who knows, and what can be archived.

The Tacit work is, to a great extent, self-managed. He or she is expected to know how to organize and manage his/her work. He/she is also expected to have knowledge or know where to find it. This means the Tacit worker comprises of four subgroups which can be mapped against their respective daily tasks. For relevance, the respective tasks have been expanded to include more specific tasks one would perform using software and Web-based tools.

Building (Developers) Create solutions that meet changing business needs by leveraging existing enterprise, partner, and public resources.

• Build self-service web apps
• Build Bill access & payment
• Build integrated on-line CRM/ERP apps

Acquiring knowledge (Data Gatherer) Need fast views of disparate information the majority of their time in the office, are very mainstream in their office looking for data.

• Search and retrieve disparate enterprise information
• Build analysis report views
• Share views with other team members

Designing (Power User) Builds situational solutions to further streamline daily tasks and shares these with others.

• Create presentation mashups
• Create next-gen portals and light analytics views
• Share views with team members

Making decisions (Knowledge Worker) Mild Analytics, Information search and data manipulation. Planning.

• Real-time & tailored information sharing
• Compose various data views
• Make decisions based on real time information

Why is this important? Tacit worker productivity increases in value when the needs of the worker (relevant data and effective use and access to knowledge) is supplied by the organization wishing to reap the benefits. It leads to greater worker efficiency reducing the cost in terms of time and energy of the respective Tacit worker. To accomplish these cost savings while maintaining worker effectiveness, the best alternative is one solution designed to be customized by the user to meet their own needs. The best technology solution is one that all Tacit workers of the organization can use to efficiently and effectively obtain or transfer knowledge. Can you say Enterprise Web 2.0?