Working Smarter part 2

  It's my fault for not posting this sooner not Colin's and thanks to Mark who nagged me about it today over lunch :-) Here is the second installment from Colin my guest blogger and senior lecturer at Durham Business School.

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Last week I started to explore the issues and challenges of improving the effectiveness of knowledge work. I see this as a major opportunity for organizations of all sizes and in all sectors. This week I just want to start to map out some the broad areas that we need to tackle. Firstly, I want to make it clear that we are NOT talking about knowledge management (KM) - although we will need to consider KM at some point.

In my view we need to explore the following areas:

The implications for senior management: there are issues of leadership, strategy, roles and culture that will contribute to making any significant improvement.

Implications for operational management: if there is going to be significant improvement there will inevitably be an impact on operational management. For example we will need to consider tactics and tools that they can employ to make a difference.

Implications for the IT function: there are also significant implications for the IT function that will affect both systems development and the operational / support roles of the function.

Implications for the individual: finally and importantly, there are implications for the individual - both knowledge workers and managers of knowledge workers.

We will also consider our effectiveness as individuals, as members of teams and in contributing to business processes. In each of these areas there are a number of important issues to consider and we will start to explore the issues and what we can do about them next week.

Just as a foot note and a more personal reflection. I'm on the second week of a very good course this week. But my laptop is not with me - the hard drive failed before I came away. So I'm back to taking notes with pen and paper rather than adding to the notes I made in OneNote as part of the first week of the course earlier in the year. I hope I can find some time when I get home to write up the notes!

Colin Ashurst

Senior Teaching Fellow: Information Systems and Business Transformation

Chief Information Officer

Durham Business School, University of Durham