Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management
Harvard Business Review, Jul 2002, Vol. 80 Issue 7, p107, 5p
Davenport, Thomas H.; Glaser, John
No matter what the industry, knowledge workers often can't keep up with the knowledge being generated. Take the story of Dr. Goldszer, for example. He is the associate chief medical officer and head of the Special Services Department at Brigham and Women's in Boston and a professor at the Harvard Medical School. As a high-end knowledge worker at the top of the medical profession, there is so much knowledge available about Dr. Goldszer's work that he cannot possibly absorb it all. It is difficult for Goldszer to stay on top of even a fraction of all the new knowledge being generated in his field and still do his job. Knowledge management, which became popular in the mid- to late 1990s, is still a good idea, according to the authors. It just needs a new approach. They recommend baking specialized knowledge into the jobs of highly skilled workers--to make the knowledge so readily accessible that it cannot be avoided. This is the main approach Partners HealthCare has taken to address Dr. Goldszer's problem. The most promising approach to bake knowledge into knowledge work is to embed it into the technology that knowledge workers use to do their jobs. While just-in-time systems revolutionized inventory management, by following much the same philosophy, the authors believe that this method could revolutionize knowledge management. The authors explore how just-in-time knowledge has been embedded into Dr. Goldszer's work and other physicians' work at a few Partners hospitals.

ISE Categories:  Timeliness