In 1998, when we wrote about what knowledge managers do, the focus of the CKO was knowledge generation and sharing, making information available over the Internet, and creating enterprise organization schemes. Today, the focus is shifting away from content, access, and sharing toward performance and getting results — e.g. reducing the cost of health care, making government services more effective, designing breakthrough products. This requires increasing the productivity of knowledge workers, the 25 to 50% of employees in advanced economies that find, create, package, distribute and apply knowledge. In this article we look at how the new focus is changing the complexion of information services and describe a support system for attaining it — for ourselves, our colleagues, and our organizations.

Productivity, performance, and results
We are beginning to get a handle on the downstream side of knowledge management — identifying content and experts, creating and organizing repositories for them, assembling information resources into a one-stop-shop called a portal. Now we are turning more attention to the upstream side — increasing the productivity of individual knowledge workers, applying knowledge to solve new challenges, leveraging intellectual assets across the information supply chain.

This time it's about people and process, not about technology. Some observers suggest that we already have too much technology for organizations to digest. It's not about building business cases, conducting usability studies, creating taxonomies, or finding a more efficient search engine. It's about finding key business problems and figuring out how to deploy all information assets — data, published material, technology, people, standards, and processes. The goal is to achieve measurable results, such as reducing the number of deaths from a certain disease, reducing the number of accidents in a manufacturing plant, or increasing the number of profitable new products.

You don't have to build a business case, because in defining the problem you have articulated the need and the appropriate metric. You don't have to conduct usability studies because the key players, not the IT function, drive the process, help design the solution, and test the prototype. You don't create taxonomies from content alone or select new a new search engine simply by conducting a vendor "bake-off." Instead, you select and customize navigation tools to fit the specific situation. Here are some examples of what we mean:

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Created on September 8, 2005 l Updated on November 2, 2006