Knowledge Matters™

I have been a bit overwhelmed with work this week and have just worked the entire weekend. I have also had writer’s block and still find myself creatively blocked, which also happens to be the name of a reel written by Ryan Canning who is a world-class bagpiper. Because I have writer’s block I thought I would share with you my knowledge productivity target™. I first came up with the idea of the knowledge productivity target™ towards the end of 2003. The target is pictured below.

You should note there are four sectors as positioned by the cross-hairs and the urgent and not urgent dimensions represented by the two circles. You should also note that urgent tasks comprise a considerable portion of the total number of tasks, and the urgency dimension affects all sectors equally. Indeed the longer a non-urgent task is left and no action taken, the more urgent it is likely to become - this is true of all sectors.

In sector one the tasks tend to be important and easy and either urgent or not urgent. This is a good sector in which to work, and I suggest that this is where knowledge workers, as opposed to managers, should be working.

Sector two tasks tend to be important and difficult and can be further divided into urgent or not urgent. But what does ‘doing the important and difficult’ actually mean? I see these activities as the mechanisms that need to be set up to make most urgent, important and easy tasks go away. I suggest that this is the sector that management should be working in for some of their time, as it is the sector for strategy development. It is the sector where good business practices that make an organisation efficient and effective are built and maintained. Examples of activities that occur in this sector include:

• Having in place a comprehensive business plan that allows physical traceability from the strategic level business goals and objectives all the way to the mundane work tasks and check lists at the shopfloor. Doing this allows an alignment of all an organisations tasks to satisfy the agreed organisational objectives. 
• Having a data and information collection and management system so that, for example, when a clerk enters a sale into the system, the sale and revenue immediately registers against a broader strategic goal and allows analysis of what that sale is contributing to in the broader plan for the organisation. The same process would be applied to the day-to-day expenses of an organisation. In short this is a comprehensive ‘quantitative’ financial management system linked to the largely ‘qualitative’ business plan. 
• Having a system that manages all the organisation’s assets and all changes in those assets, including movement of the assets across the organisation no matter where they are placed geographically. This means any organisational or structural changes, including the integration of new acquisitions, can occur efficiently and with minimal interruption. 
• Having a project management system that allows the management of change across the organisation linked directly into the actual system it is changing – the products, services and/or capabilities of the organisation itself. This might mean that change can be monitored on a continual rather than periodic basis. Also, it is likely to far more accurate.

Sector three contains non-important and easy tasks, again divided into urgent and not urgent tasks. Sector four also contains urgent and non-urgent tasks but they are of a non-important and difficult nature.

Clearly little if any time should be spent in sectors three and four and resources should not be allocated to them.

Using the knowledge productivity target™ as a guide, I suggest the objective of a knowledge management initiative is to:

• squeeze and compress the outer circle to decrease the number of tasks overall;
• squeeze and compress the inner circle to decrease the proportion of urgent tasks;
• push the vertical axis to the right to increase the proportion of easy tasks, simultaneously decreasing the proportion of difficult tasks; and 
• push the horizontal axis downward to focus on the important tasks at the expense of the non-important tasks.

I suggest knowing where your organisation spends the bulk of its time on the target matters!   I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Regards, Graham.