Story:
Knowledge Work & Knowledge Worker

Introduction

I have heard around always knowledge workers need special type of attention compare to blue collar jobs. On the other side, I have been seen a behavior among organizational leaders that they would like to focus and address issues like pushing working hours, lack of trust in employees on their task and etc which leads them to a micro-level management as well as coming up with strategies which are more relevant to blue collar workers.

In my humble opinion, basically what software developers are demanding is:  Knowledge-Based Organizations and what issue they are facing in different companies is: There are too many rules which are having a root to blue collar working environments.

This post is trying to have describe about differences between knowledge works, knowledge workers and blue collar jobs.

Knowledge vs. Information

There is a common misunderstanding that knowledge is information. It is tremendously important to differentiate them. In following table it is trying to describe their differences in a brief approach:

What's Knowledge Work?

According to Framework for Knowledge Work Analysis (Efimova, 2004), knowledge work is a subsumed of individual, communities, networks and ideas. Following figure is show case of these items:

What make knowledge work unique, is interaction of each elements of the circle. Also you can see the most common characteristic of knowledge work is: conversation and collaboration. Also as you can see conflicts are also part of knowledge work definition.

Maslow and Drucker

Abraham Maslow has proposed a psychological theory which is well-known by: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. This theory has been published in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivations". Based on definition of knowledge work, the very first element of its structure is individual or human. It would be jelly good to have a look at Maslow's proposal which has been extended to represent what is the satisfaction/frustration cycle in following diagram:

I believe in each level by itself is quite intuitive and does not need any further description. As we investigate more about employee satisfaction or frustration, basically we can easily map their issues into such structure. Most of firms are only provide "safety needs", then if there were a good relationship they might reach to "Love and Belonging" level among colleagues. This is the point that most of firms cannot proceed to higher levels and satisfaction process will be broken and frustration will be developed instead.

Now let's move to knowledge worker productivity concept. There is management bible called: "Management Challenges for the 21st Century" by Peter F.Drucker. In his book it has been dedicated a section into Knowledge Work. In regard to knowledge work productivity he has written six major phenomenon characteristics of Knowledge Work Productivity as following items:

1. Knowledge Worker always ask: “What is the task?”
2. They have to have autonomy.
3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work and responsibilities.
4. Required continuous learning and continuous teaching.
5. Focus is not on quantity, but the most important concern is quality.
6. Knowledge Worker to be seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost”.

If we want to map Drucker's factors to Maslow's theory, in my humble opinion we can see that:

Also there is a basic comparison between "Blue Collar Worker Productivity" and "Knowledge  Worker Productivity". This comparison is described in following table:

What's Knowledge-Based Organization

If we would like to have an eye-bird view on architecture of an Knowledge-Based Organization, following figure is the best media.

How to be an Knowledge-Based Organization

This is the most challenging question and concern. There are very different approaches, the one which in my opinion is very relevant is:

In the above figure, it describes to achieve a good result what are the required layers and what the core should be.

Sample Reference Architecture

Each firm need to have a reference architecture to ensure its going on the right track, this reference architecture can be look like following figure:

Also this organizational transformation needs:

As a consequence, being a knowledge base firm for a software developers are achievable but it needs everyone's dedication specially organizational leaders and managers.