During the clashes between capital and labour in the late 1800s, employers had fought to obtain a work environment in which knowledge was built into the technical system (Prichard 2000).
Employers began to recognize the value of knowledge in the work process. However, knowledge among employees had to be limited. This meant that while employees had sufficient knowledge to conduct their work operations, employers retained a large portion of it so that they
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could maintain control over the enterprise. Furthermore, the mentality of workers had to be such that the needs of workers came second to those of the company.
In 1960, Peter Drucker coined the terms “knowledge work” and “knowledge worker” as the
“knowledge society” emerged in which knowledge became the basic economic resource and in which knowledge workers had to play a central role (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995: 43). Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) argue that the creation of knowledge requires the full participation of all members of an enterprise. However, not all responsibilities were the same. According to the authors, the “knowledge crew” consists of:
Knowledge practitioners – their basic role is the embodiment of knowledge. They accumulate, generate and update both tacit and explicit knowledge, acting almost as
“walking archives” on a day-to-day basis. These workers are frontline workers who are in direct contact with the outside world and are able to obtain access to the latest information on developments in the market, technology or competition. The quality of knowledge that they accumulate and generate is determined by the quality of their direct experiences on the frontline of the day-to-day business.
Knowledge engineers – they are middle managers that serve as a bridge between the visionary ideals of the top and the often-chaotic market reality of those on the frontline of business. By creating mid-level business and product concepts, they mediate between
“what is” and “what should be”.
A number of qualifications must be met for middle managers to become effective knowledge engineers. They:
- Must be equipped with top-notch capabilities of project coordination and management;
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- Need to be skilled at coming up with hypotheses in order to create new concepts;
- Need to have the ability to integrate various methodologies for knowledge creation;
- Need communication skills to encourage dialogue among team members;
- Should be proficient at employing metaphors in order to help others generate and articulate imagination;
- Should engender trust among team members;
- Should have the ability to envision the future course of action based on an understanding of the past.
• Knowledge officer – the basic role of knowledge officers, who are top or senior managers of a company, is the management of the total organizational knowledge- creation process at the corporate level. Knowledge officers give a company’s knowledge-creating activities a sense of direction by:
- Articulating grand concepts on what the company ought to be;
- Establishing a knowledge vision in the form of a corporate vision or policy statement;
- Setting standards for justifying the value of knowledge created.
Another key role of knowledge officers is the establishment of a knowledge vision that defines the value system of the company. It is this value system that evaluates, justifies and determines the quality of knowledge the company creates. Knowledge officers should be aware that their aspirations and ideals determine the quality of knowledge the company creates. While the ideals of top management are important, they also need to foster a high degree of personal commitment by other members of the knowledge-creating crew. In addition, knowledge officers are also responsible for justifying the value of knowledge that is constantly being developed by the crew (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). The concept of knowledge officer is similar to that of Skyrme’s
“chief knowledge officer”. Skyrme (2002) points out that the chief knowledge officer is a senior
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executive who is responsible for ensuring that an organization maximizes the value it achieves through one of its most important assets – knowledge.
When planning the implementation of a knowledge management programme, the organization needs to consider whether to create a leadership role to develop and drive the process, for instance, the chief knowledge officer. Many firms have devolved responsibility to an existing or new position. Some firms use a cross-functional team to develop knowledge management while in others the CEO has taken the leadership role. According to Lloyd (1999 in Soliman and Spooner 2000: 341), the characteristics and challenges of the chief knowledge officer / chief learning officer should include:
1. Interpersonal / communication skills;
2. Passionate visionary leadership;
3. Business acumen;
4. Strategic thinking skills;
5. Championship of change with the ability to withstand ambiguity and uncertainty; and 6. Collaborative skills (this is a rare skill and is the ability to pull together people from
different parts of the organization to work as one team).
As stated, the chief knowledge officer drives the knowledge processes in the organization.
However, he or she does not do it in isolation and therefore needs to understand what motivates knowledge workers. The purpose of the study conducted by Mahen Tampoe in 1998 (in Myers, 1996: 184) was to gain an understanding of what characteristics were important to a group of knowledge workers to determine what motivated them. It revealed that knowledge workers were motivated by:
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• Personal growth – the opportunity for individuals to realize their potential, supporting the view that knowledge workers sought intellectual, personal and career growth;
• Operational autonomy – to have control of their task while observing the conditions of strategic direction and self-measuring indices;
• Task achievement – the achievement of producing work of a standard and quality of which individuals can be proud;
• Money – earning an income which is just reward for the contribution made and enables employees to share in the wealth created by them, through incentive schemes geared to their company’s success and related to their personal performance.
The above motivational factors relate closely to education and reward as they are concerned with improvement. As stated earlier, Prichard (2000: 207-208) argues for a transition from knowledge workers to learning workers. The researcher interprets this transition to mean that workers do not merely receive knowledge but are active learning agents. This transition allows for the worker to become smarter, quicker and more flexible and adaptable. Inherent in becoming a learning worker is the process of education. Castells (2000) argues that in defining a new worker and her or his education, there is a difference between generic labour and self- programming labour. The critical quality in differentiating between these two kinds of labour is education, and the capacity of accessing higher levels of education: that is, embodied knowledge and information. The concept of education must be distinguished from skills. Skills can quickly be made obsolete by technical and organizational change. Education is the process by which people acquire the capability to refine the necessary skills for a given task constantly, and to access the sources for learning these skills. Generic labour is assigned a given task, with no reprogrammable capability, and it does not presuppose the embodiment of information and knowledge beyond the ability to receive and execute signs. These ‘human terminals’ can be replaced by machines, or by another body around the city, country or the world. Legal practitioners are in a constant process of learning and relearning, which make them ideal candidates to be learning workers.
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As indicated in the introduction to the chapter, the research will be guided by the GWU model of knowledge management. The four pillars of this model will be probed in the next section of this chapter.