By Tarunkumar Singhal, Raman Jokhakar, Chartered Accountants
fiogf49gjkf0d
In the half century since Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers”, these employees have become not just an important part of the workforce but the dominant part. The two critical drivers of productivity in any production process are the way the work is structured and the company’s ability to capture the lessons of experience. These drivers are, of course, interdependent: how you structure the work influences your ability to learn from it. In decision factories, a mismatch between the reality of work and the way it is structured leads directly to inefficiencies in allocating knowledge work. Knowledge work actually comes primarily in the form of projects, not routine daily tasks… Knowledge workers experience big swings between peaks and valleys of decision-making intensity. That VP of marketing will be busy during the launch of an important product or when a competitive threat arises — and really, really busy if the two overlap. Between these spells, however, she will have few or even no decisions to make, and she may have little to do but catch up on emails… All managers in all areas tend to staff for what they perceive as the peak demand for knowledge work in their area of responsibility.
This institutionalises a significant level of excess capacity spread in small increments throughout decision factories. That is why decision factory productivity is a persistent modern challenge.
(Source: Extracts from “Rethinking the Decision Factory” by Roger Martin : The Economic Times dated 24-09-2013).
