Attention Harvest
Bring Home the Knowledge
Someone once remarked: "Journalists are in the business of harvesting attention."
This is also true for knowledge workers. Attention is the concentration of mental powers. The mission is to cultivate attention and assure its effective application to revenue-producing business processes.
Organized attention needs to be delivered to what matters most to improving business performance. Put another way, as Professor Hayek wrote in 1945, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
In the past, to improve productivity, we just wanted to: "Get information to the workers!" This spawned vast networks, advanced architectures, portals, all manner of access mechanisms, electronic appliances, ...and... an information glut.
The irony is that workers now have more information than they could ever use. Information exhaustion has set in.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "More information isn't the solution. It's the problem."
All the accessing, searching, profiling, databasing, workflowing and portaling in the world won't help if workers don’t have context and meaning in their mission.
For example, over last decade, many companies have focused attention on their operational processes such as accounting, personnel, manufacturing and IT. This “process re-engineering” only delivered marginal cost reductions and revenue improvements -- not the factor improvements promised.
Business leaders are now discovering it is much more important to optimize and focus attention on revenue-producing business opportunities. It’s smarter than the continuous refinement of existing structures and past achievements. Peter Drucker calls this process displacement "organized abandonment."
This course change has expanded the shared services provider market (“apps on tap”), Web services, consulting, outsourcing and renewed the “outside-in” focus on customers, for example.
This shift requires a new way of thinking about knowledge management. It is no longer appropriate to “capture, aggregate, diffuse and disseminate” all enterprise information.
Codification, access and presentation are important, but are consistently over-sold by vendor's coin-operated sales people.
Information is always there, but attention walks out the door every evening. Attention will always be precious and in short supply. It must be harbored and targeted to profit making activities. Attention needs to be optimized and unconditionally focused on customers and revenue-producing business processes.
Collaborative technologies must unconsciously capture the ephemeral nature of attention though omnifariousness capabilities, availability and secure, transorganizational usage models.
Each knowledge worker must strive to enhance zones of collaboration, sharing, learning, context and community. They must pursue an environment of effortless sharing and spontaneous collaboration. The objective is to maximize the efficiencies & effectiveness of mental concentration and imagination. When successful, they ease the application of organized attention to business opportunity.
Clever managers understand that it's the dynamic and contextual interaction of stakholders that really drives and improves operating margins.
To optimized attention, give authority to the receiver, not the supplier of information. Mobilize trusted intermediaries such as enterprise investigative reporters and reference assistants. Adopt a retail approach to information, not wholesale.
To harness attention, use the narrative form to establish context and make sense. Honor collaboration. Build physical and virtual environments that expand and extend same-time interaction. Informate routine procedural activities to conserve intellectual effort for revenue-producing business processes.
Drive an ecosystem of communications and information that securely spans organizations and provides rich intermodal collaboration for people. Focus on conductivity not just connectivity.
Practice “Infokanban,” or just-in-time information management and delivery. Strive for an information supply chain that is just sufficient to exceed customer expectations and expand revenue production.
Build-down or outsource expensive, low-value, non-customer processes. Deliberately endeavor to improve the quality of intellectual work life at the expense of linear, mechanical habit.
Precision engineer your attention capital. Pursue multi-valent and intermodal collaborative technologies. Interlock with your customers, suppliers, employees and partners with secure person-to-person networks.
Productivity growth is enhanced by sheltering attention for application to relevant, profit building intellectual effort. The goal is to reap and organize attention to improve intellectual effectiveness and performance for revenue producing processes.
Business innovation has always required leadership, people, process and technology. New are broad-based collaboration requirements and a superabundance of information. Knowledge workers need to marshal business awareness. They need to create the lean and mean information supply needed to optimize mental concentration and focus. The deliberate assembly and application of organizational attention on revenue-producing business processes will improve competitiveness and delight customers.
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