What mass amateurisation means

I trained as librarian just as the internet hit the mass market a decade ago. Pre-browser, online searching was an arcane, expensive business. You needed to know the obscure syntaxes of a range of different databases. Identifying & then assembling information from different sources was a skilled task. Then all of a sudden there was Alta Vista, Yahoo & then Google. Not perfect but "good enough" for the masses. All of a sudden, everyone was an information scientist.

Something similar has happened in many fields. There used to be typing pools & presentation design teams. Now there is Word & Powerpoint. Many organisations are replacing experienced travel agents with online self-service tools. And with email & blogs, everyone is a communications professional.

Now this is a terrible threat for people like me. And a wonderful opportunity.

As the Powerpoint example indicates, just giving people the tools of skilled expert does not make them into an expert. However, most of the time, the results are "good enough" to justify the cost savings. And if the results aren't "good enough" - well, phone that designer mate of yours and find a way of smuggling his costs through on your Amex.

Increasingly, being a professional will be less about doing the work yourself (although that should never go away) and more about showing amateurs how to do it good themselves. In effect, we all have to become teachers. And this involves two things:

• Equipping them with the skills to use the tools they have to achieve the basic objectives they want.
• Ensuring their realise their limits and come to you for the complicated stuff - e.g. finding a local Mexican restaurant is not the same kind of information challenge as conducting patent application due diligence.

And if you are a bright, engaged professional then this is a good thing. You will stay on your toes, your customers will do the boring stuff for you and only ask you to do interesting work - and in doing so grow the market for that interesting work. Of course, if you want to stay doing the same thing for the next 30 years then you are in trouble.

What is a knowledge worker?

As an addendum to this post, I would claim that anyone becomes a knowledge worker when they have to think. And people only think when they are prompted by the unexpected. So a knowledge worker is someone who faces the unexpected.

The reason more & more of us can be tagged as knowledge workers is not that work is becoming more virtual (though it is). Nor is it that more of us are "symbolic interactionists" (though we may be). It is because the world is getting more complex. More interconnected. And the unexpected is getting more and more common.

How do we educate people to deal with the unexpected?

ROI & productivity

One question that came up on the Wednesday night of wikis was around ROI. What is the ROI for a wiki?

Olivier Headshift talks about ROI. And I agree with Simon Carswell's comment that the "I" should be low. This statement provoked the justifiable question about the effort involved in wiki development & management. Sven made the excellent point that there is little "extra" effort that goes into wiki activities. People are sending emails and messing about with Word documents anyway. But these activities are largely invisible.

All the Enterprise 2.0 stuff is really about collaboration in organisations. And collaboration is all about improving productivity and nuturing creativity. However most organisations do not measure their worker productivity well (and they have no idea whatsoever about worker creativity). This is especially true for organisations with workers who think for a living. Professional services firms tend to measure productivity as billable hours. However the billable hour model simply means that you've spent an hour doing something. The only incentive to do it better or quicker is the possibility your competition might.

If asking the ROI question prompts you to discuss the productivity & practices of your workers with them then it could be useful. Otherwise I share Olivier's concerns about playing ROI games.

thoughtglue & 10 KM tips

Stephen Collins has 2 blogs. I have only just discovered thoughglue. SC posts Cory Banks' 10 KM tips which I think are pretty cool.

You could almost recast CB's points as KM improv:

• Start from where you and they are.
• Go somewhere new & better with them (but note the previous point).
• Pay attention to them (& what they do).
• Adopt, adapt & change.
• Use what's to hand and fits in (i.e. technology).

Or something.

And SC is right about this being the wrong question. And as we're on the improv tip here in major way at the moment (don't worry, the symptoms will pass) - the manager of knowledgeable subordinates has to take what they offer and respond with "yes and" in some way.

Knowledge workers (enough with the learning already)

This presentation by Stephen Collins on Knowledge Worker 2.0 is pretty cool. SC is absolutely to correct that knowledge work needs to be seen in a broader context and we need to look beyond processes & tools. Stephen also comments on this post by David Armano on Synthesizers. David is not talking about Moogs or Fairlights - but rather individuals who are good at creating new stuff fro existing stuff or Knowledge Workers as Stephen would call them.

I like David's image but as I've been pondering critical thinking and collective learning, I would have to add two things to David's model:

• A synthesizer is as good at identifying people and their skills/experience/knowledge as she is data. And she will collaborate with those people as she finds patterns in the data. She will not only tell you the future, she will make it happen with you.
• A synthesizer will get better at their synthesizing. They will learn iteratively from each attempt to develop the future (because that is the job of the synthesizer - to give you a future). There's a feedback loop in there somewhere.

Pondering this some more, much of the talk around knowledge workers has isolated them as "widgets" (as SC notes). We need to think of our knowledge worker ecologies. And we can find out about these ecologies using social software. Our enterprises are already social, we just need more ways of seeing that...