The venerated Austrian management author Peter Drucker recently made an extremely valuable observation. Apparently, the most important contribution of management in the 20th century was to increase the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing by a factor of 50. Drucker continued, the most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker.
Nowhere is this goal more relevant than to the Irish economy where, in a very short space of time, we have been transformed from a low cost, low value location for foreign investment to what experts are now describing as a knowledge economy where we compete to win high value jobs to sustain our growth. The knowledge worker – be they management or professional employee – is key to making this equation work. Technology enters the equation when we start to talk about knowledge workers in this country, not working harder but working smarter.
The National College of Ireland recently collaborated with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and Microsoft to investigate the world of work in contemporary Ireland. The key conclusion from their report was that, while technology could help us make significant inroads into helping us better manage and use the growing volume of information, the introduction of those new technologies would have to be coupled with significant investments in management capability as well as personal training and development.
Simply, there is no point in upgrading to Windows Vista and Office 2007 if the management and staff of a company aren’t trained to exploit the new features in the applications. Likewise, what is the point in a company introducing an Enterprise Resource Planning software system if the management team isn’t cogniscent of the true potential and benefits of it? Worse still is if the staff aren’t trained properly to milk the maximum benefit from the system.
Experts describe information overload as being a major challenge, and this is true when you consider that 84% of all received e-mail is classified as spam. Considerable amounts of times are wasted by workers sifting through information – not just spam – that brings no measurable benefit to the organisation. Workers needs to be trained to manage information – to discern quickly what data will bring greatest benefit to the organisation and drop that data which won’t. Technology systems can help people manage information and provide better insights for decision making. That combination of technology and people training is our best bet in increasing worker productivity and maintaining economic prosperity.
Stephen Cawley – Editor
Ltd
