O come Organizzazione

Ecco l'opinione di Gerry McGovern. Voi, cosa ne pensate?

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: NO SUCH THING AS KNOWLEDGE WORKER
For those who manage well, there is a bright and prosperous
future. For those who are managed, the future-certainly the
income prospects-are not so bright.
There is no such thing as a knowledge worker in the sense that
we have agricultural or factory workers. All knowledge work is
first and foremost a management task. Of course, strictly
speaking, management is a type of work. However, in knowledge
work, everyone is a manager to one degree or another.
Right now, you may not in fact be managing people. You are,
however, managing your time, managing content, and perhaps
managing other resources.
In a knowledge organization, the role of management changes.
Management becomes less about setting and policing rules for
workers and more about establishing strategy, setting goals,
showing leadership, and measuring results.
Knowledge management is less about managing people and more
about giving them the right goals, the right motivation, and the
right tools, and clearly articulating how success or failure
will be measured.
As a knowledge manager, you should look to your manager for the
broad strategic direction and you should look to yourself for
the ability to manage your day. You must develop this crucial
skill because, if you're waiting to be told what to do, then
your job is in serious danger of being automated or outsourced.
Let's say you're part of a web team and your day-to-day job
involves turning print documents into PDFs and putting them up.
That is a job that requires very little skill or thinking. That
is a job that could just as easily be outsourced or offshored.
If you are a knowledge manager, on the other hand, you would
stand back and ask the fundamental question: What is the task?
The task is not to put stuff up on your website. The task is to
effectively communicate with your readers. A knowledge manager
would question whether print content is truly effective on the
Web. A knowledge manager would explore what better ways there
are to publish this content on the Web.
You send and receive many emails every day. As a knowledge
manager, you need to constantly question whether you are
effectively communicating in your emails. Are your emails being
ignored or deleted? That's a big problem. How well do you
organize the emails you send and receive? How easy is it for you
to quickly find an important email?
Are your presentations effective? Do they make people more
knowledgeable? Do they make them more likely to act in a way you
want them to? Are your reports effective? A knowledge manager is
always asking this question: Am I effective?
We are all managers now. In a new area such as the Web, we may
in fact have to manage our managers. You need to manage your
manager's expectations of what the website can practically
achieve, because you probably know a lot more about the real
potential of your website than your manager does.
There isn't a great future for those who do not rise to the
knowledge management challenge. As organizations continue to
automate, outsource, and offshore, those people who remain will
become invaluable to the success of the organization. They will
be the knowledge managers.