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Tacit Interactions and Knowledge Workers
James Manyika of McKinsey Silicon Valley last week had an article called “The coming imperative for the world’s knowledge economy” in the Comment section of the Financial Times. Manyika and others at McKinsey have argued that the term Knowledge worker and its definition as people “who think for a living” covers too big of a group of people.
Manyika observed that certain types of knowledge workers have more impact on the success or failure of a company. He found that these key workers typcially are involved in high levels of what he calls of “tacit interactions“. Tacit interactions usually involve making complex judgments, problem-solving and exchanging information. Industries where tacit interactions frequently occur are publishing, healthcare and software. And it’s in these industries where the gap between the best and worst performers is the greatest.
Manyika argues that the past decade has seen IT excel at automating transactions, and that the next decade of IT will shift emphasis from efficiency to effectiveness. He sees part of this happening with IT collaboration tools that can act as enablers of more efficient tacit interactions.
This week the annual AIIM show was held in Philadelphia. Manyika’s ideas are playing out there. AIIM has evolved and the emphasis has changed considerably since the early days when the focus was on strictly Imaging and Document Management. There is keen interest in companies like Formtek that are providing Collaboration and Business Process Management solutions.
Current hot topics at AIIM like Distributed Capture aren’t emphasizing the volume and processing speed; they focus on improving the task of getting information into the system as fast as possible, so that the most current data can be made available for making the best decisions.
For organizations, tacit knowledge sharing plays a very pivotal role in bringing up thought leadership. As you said, tacit knowledge is implicit and unique, it gives a different perspective to an issue