This is the second half of a two-part article that explores the findings of a recent study on the future of the knowledge worker. For Part I, click through to KMWorld Magazine.

The purpose of the research was to look at longer-term trends in how organizations will likely try to provide a compelling work environment that attracts, retains and leverages the best of the knowledge workers of the future.

The study was sponsored by The George Washington University (GWU) and the Institute for Knowledge and Innovation at GWU. Some KMWorld readers were part of the sampling population and accessed the survey through a posting on the KMWorld Web site. Several of the main trends identified in the survey are described in this article.

Top type of future knowledge work

Given the unstructured nature of knowledge work, the concept of "one size fits all" does not really apply here. Borrowing from a four-part work segmentation theme by Tom Davenport (Thinking for a Living, 2005), the survey asked what types of knowledge work are likely to become the most highly valued in the organization over the next 10 to 12 years. Collaborative work (project design team, global consultancy, etc.) received the highest ranking by the survey respondents. That was consistent with the high interest expressed throughout the survey in increasing collaborative support capabilities. Expert judgment work (research scientist, legal specialist, etc.) ranked a distant second, followed by process-oriented work (financial reporting, quality assurance, etc.) and transaction work (tech support center, billing inquiry, etc.).

Most valuable future skills

Over the next 10 to 12 years, team/collaborative skills will be the capabilities that organizations value the most for knowledge workers who are 25 years old or younger. Collaboration capabilities are essential for workers with little experience so they can learn and contribute through others in team/community participation.

The survey takers were asked to select from a list of 10 different skills and expertise possibilities. The top valued expertise of team/collaboration skills was followed closely by specialized technical expertise, which organizations indicated is a primary way that the younger worker can add immediate value to team and community initiatives. The remaining valued capabilities, in order of importance, were: analytics/ modeling, entrepreneurial skills, systems thinking and analysis, project management, strategic thinking, knowledge management, international experience and general management. PDF of charts may be viewed here.

For the 26- to 40-year-old workers who, in many cases, will form the core of the next-generation leadership, the organization would value highest the capabilities that enable major responsibility for the organization’s operations, strategy and overall performance. Those capabilities for that age group include project management as the highest skill and expertise, followed by strategy and strategic thinking, and specialized expertise. The remaining responses, in order, were for team/ collaboration, systems thinking and analysis, general management skills, knowledge management, entrepreneurial, international experience and analytics/modeling.

Top future technology investments

The top priority for future technology investment to support performance improvement for the 25-year-old worker or younger will be collaboration tools. That is consistent with organizational views that collaborative work will be the most valuable type of future work and that collaborative skills will be the most highly valued skill set of the younger worker. Technology investments will also be directed toward enabling improved communication, information access and mobile work through enhanced e-mail, search and portals infrastructure, virtual workspace tools and information processing tools for visualization, expertise location and business intelligence.

For the 26- to 40-year-old workers, the top technology investment priorities will also go toward collaboration and e-mail, search and portals infrastructure. The second tier of technology investments for the older workers, however, would be to enable better decision-making and leadership support through content analysis and sense-making tools and business intelligence capabilities. For both age groups, intelligent agent software and machine learning tools received little interest as technology investments by the survey organizations, even though ongoing update/enhancement of worker skills was projected to be a continuing challenge over the next 10 to 12 years.

Eco/green impact on knowledge work

As the eco/green movement continues to gain momentum and visibility in society, organizations are presenting a mixed view of what the major impact will likely be on the workplace over the next 10 to 12 years. The top two survey responses were a tie between two different potential impacts. Organizations believe one implication will be a significant expansion and support of virtual work, which reinforces the era of mobile work and the adoption of technology that enables work anywhere. On the other hand, an equal number of organizations foresee and expect little or no change from the current situation in the workplace, which reflects the realities of resistance to change and the requirement by some organizations of a physical presence in the workplace.

In a somewhat surprising rating, the professionals and executives who took the survey anticipated little or no increase in car-pooling and public transportation as a result of the eco/green movement.

Who took the survey?

One hundred and twenty-five professionals and executives participated in the survey, which was conducted in mid-2008. Three-quarters of the respondents were from North America and one-quarter from Europe and South America. The survey group was highly senior with almost half consisting of executives and directors/managers. A wide range of organizational sizes were represented with more than one-third reporting 25,000 or more employees. Approximately two-thirds were from business and one-third from government organizations. The 35-part questionnaire was developed through interviews with KM thought leaders, KM publishers, academic leaders, business/government professionals and survey design experts.

Student Affairs Information & Technology Services (SAITS) within the Division of Student Affairs at California State Polytechnic University Pomona has chosen an enterprise wiki solution, eTouch’s SamePage, for its knowledge management needs.

According to eTouch, SAITS evaluated a number of technology options including Microsoft Word, content management systems (CMS) and open source wikis, before selecting its wiki solution.

Kevin Morningstar, executive director of SAITS, says, "With Word, the documents were not very searchable, and we had limited ability to share these documents at the same time. We tried to use a CMS to create internal Web pages, but it wasn’t set up to manage dynamic pages with multiple contributors at multiple times. It was unwieldy and simply not friendly for collaboration."

Concerning SAITS’ choice of SamePage, Morningstar continues, "I definitely feel we made the right choice. We didn’t do any training, but everybody can jump in and use the product with zero startup time. It’s that intuitive."

eTouch reports that:

• The SAITS evaluation team determined that wikis, by their very nature, offer a collaborative environment to build content, as well as support the critical search, linking and information accessibility that were key elements in compiling and sharing the department’s knowledge.
• One member of the SAITS team had the wiki up and running in 24 hours, and no team training was necessary.

EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Kazeon Systems, an e-discovery software provider for corporations, legal service providers, government entities and law firms. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2009, subject to customary closing conditions and is not expected to have a material impact on revenue or EPS for the full 2009 fiscal year.

With Kazeon, EMC will be able to offer end-to-end, in-house e-discovery and litigation readiness solutions as part of the EMC SourceOne family for integrated but modular e-discovery, archiving and compliance. Kazeon allows organizations to identify, preserve, collect, process, analyze and review information in accordance with the widely accepted Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) framework. Core to Kazeon is its ability to handle electronically stored information (ESI) that resides anywhere in the enterprise environment--including content on laptops, desktops, content management repositories (including EMC Documentum), Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Lotus Domino, e-mail archives and file shares.

The Kazeon offering is available as an appliance, enabling organizations to quickly deploy the solution. This enables Early Case Assessment (ECA) to determine case merit and legal strategies, possibly avoiding costly legal fees. Kazeon’s targeted collection capabilities ensure avoidance of the classic problem of over-collection, which often leads to high retention and review costs. In addition, Kazeon’s legal hold management capability ensures no erroneous deletion of data and its metadata. Further, the Kazeon solution is capable of performing fine-grained analytics, including concept-based search and analysis, and offering a collaborative review platform for distributed reviewers.

IBM has unveiled new enterprise content management (ECM) software, which, the company says, is designed to enable clients to manage their increasing volumes of information and reduce their business processing time, helping to cut costs and increase efficiency.

IBM adds that the new software includes a comprehensive business process management offering with analytic capabilities, new features in IBM’s content management product line and full-featured ECM starter packs that are specifically designed for clients looking for smaller deployments.

IBM elaborates on the new offering:

• By consolidating five products into one offering, IBM’s new content-centric business process management (BPM) bundle provides clients with more functionality and improved ease of use, and simplifies the way they obtain BPM capabilities by offering a comprehensive, all-inclusive product for content-centric BPM. Included in the IBM FileNet Business Process Manager bundle are IBM FileNet Process Monitor, IBM FileNet Business Process Framework, IBM FileNet Connector for Microsoft Visio, and IBM FileNet eForms. Addressing business activity monitoring capabilities, the offering also includes IBM Cognos Now, which is designed to provide clients with real-time monitoring and visibility into business operations.
• IBM FileNet Business Process Manager utilizes Web 2.0 technologies such as enterprise mashups from IBM, along with a set of standards-based widgets. These ECM-based widgets are visual services that provide useful ECM and BPM functions. Assembling widgets and mashing data together gives organizations more adaptable options for ECM applications, reducing development time and increasing business agility.
• IBM Content Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager are secure and open content repositories designed to provide content services such as security, search, integration and workflow. New improvements in IBM Content Manager include enhanced document handling capabilities; consumability and performance enhancements; process automation, execution, and management via BPM integration; full-text search (z/OS), and high-volume batch loading capability (z/OS). Enhancements to IBM FileNet Content Manager include significant improvements in installation and upgrade processes, reducing the cost of deploying enterprise class content capabilities.

In addition, IBM’s ECM portfolio now includes ECM starter packs. The packs are four full-featured ECM packages targeted for smaller or departmental deployments. The starter packs include: IBM Content Manager, IBM FileNet Content Manager, IBM FileNet Business Process Manager, and IBM Content Collector Discovery Analytics.

Sony's PC division has signed a distribution deal with Google to include Google's Chrome browser on all new Sony Vaio computers. Chrome has struggled to make a dent in Microsoft's dominance in the web browser market, as its 30 million users constitute only 2% of market share, compared to Internet Explorer's 68%. This could be the start of a new wave of distribution deals between hardware manufacturers and software companies that want to take a bite out of Microsoft's market share.

(www.google.com, www.sony.com)

New York-based startup Dorthy.com has launched an online search filtering service. The site brings professionally produced and user-generated multimedia content from all over the web to the user. Using natural language processing, Dorthy.com lets users set up a search one time and it pulls in content related to your interest from other users on the site and from all over the web. Dorthy.com has raised $4 million in total funding from various angel investors since the company's inception.

(www.dorthy.com)

SDL Tridion has launched Safeguard, a quality and compliance monitoring tool to help brand managers and content editors achieve a high-quality Web presence. Safeguard automatically scans companies’ Web sites to expose any issues with search engine optimization (SEO), usability, accessibility, legal and brand standards.

The company reports that Safeguard is a Web site quality and compliance monitoring tool powered by Magus ActiveStandards and integrated into SDL Tridion’s Web content management system. By monitoring compliance with a wide variety of guidelines and rules created by communications specialists, the tool significantly contributes to improved SEO, visitor experience, usability and brand value.

The tool allows editors to proactively validate a page in real time in the pre-publication staging environment. Safeguard uses a best-practice library of built-in checkpoints, and every checkpoint flags the type of issues it addresses—usability, accessibility or SEO—enabling editors to prioritize which errors to correct first.

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and Collexis Holdings, Inc., have collaborated to produce the AIP UniPHY scientific networking site for physical scientists. AIP UniPHY differs from other social networking sites in that it comes pre-populated with the profiles of hundreds of thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries, all interconnected by virtue of their publication histories. Any scientist who has published at least three articles over the past 10 years in one of the more than 100 journals in the Searchable Physics Information Notices (SPIN) database has a profile on AIP UniPHY.

Each profile is connected to a network of other profiles that belong to a person's co-authors on any paper, as well as those co-authors' co-authors.

(www.aip.org; www.collexis.com; www.aipuniphy.org)

Global social media network sevenload has announced that it will now be possible to view search results for videos and photos in 3D. This new feature is being presented through a partnership with Cooliris, creators of the Cooliris "cinematic" browser add-on. In addition to the already existing detailed and thumbnail views, users will now be able to select the new Cooliris slideshow to view search items arranged in a 3D wall. Powered by Cooliris's Embed Wall product, this new feature is intended to deliver faster load times and more streamlined search results.

(www.sevenload.com; www.cooliris.com)

Deep Web Technologies has used its federated search technologies to construct a prototype for a translation program. An early prototype was demonstrated to the members of the WorldWideScience Alliance in June, and, when completed, will translate a user's search query into the native language of the collections being searched, will translate result titles and snippets back to the user's original language and aggregate and rank these results according to relevance. The current prototype provides for searches of collections in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.

(www.deepwebtech.com)

Oracle announced the availability of an integrated service combining the capabilities of Oracle CRM On Demand with InQuira's On Demand Web self-service applications. The integrated, on demand service enables customers to go seamlessly from self-service to live agent-assisted service. Service agents receive an overall view of customer issues and actions taken, providing a consistent experience across Web, phone and community-based channels.

(www.oracle.com; www.inquira.com)

You know online social networking has reached critical mass when physicists get their very own social network. While AIP UniPHY isn’t exactly Facebook, it is a networking site devoted to connecting physical scientists to one another. On Tuesday, September 8, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) unveiled the launch edition of its new site, AIP UniPHY– a scientific networking platform for communicating with colleagues, identifying potential collaborators, and keeping up with competitors.

Tim Ingoldsby, AIP’s director of strategic initiatives and publisher relations, says UniPHY is home to about 180,000 scientists’ profiles. One of the things that make this network different than more traditional social sites—other than, perhaps, its preponderance of brainy members—is that rather than waiting for users to sign-up, UniPHY developed profiles for its potential users. Through AIP’s partnership with Collexis Holdings, Inc., a developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, UniPHY is able to gather information about researchers and pre-populate profiles with it. UniPHY does the work, and as Ingoldsby says, "Researchers just have to claim it as theirs."

Using Collexis’s proprietary Fingerprint technology, AIP UniPHY enables individuals to search for and locate documents, researchers, trends, and new discoveries. UniPHY starts by making connections based on a researchers publishing history, making it the world’s first literature-based, professional scientific networking platform. In essence, Collexis scans journal databases and makes connections based on a particular scientist’s publishing history, and co-authors. It also provides information like the number of papers someone has published, how many co-authors that author had, and what topics he has written about.

"By providing pre-populated profiles," said John Haynes, AIP’s vice-president, publishing, in a press release, "we hope to facilitate the process by which researchers connect and share data. We expect that this will both increase the number of significant breakthroughs made across a range of disciplines, and decrease the time it takes to bring these innovations about."

All of this information is presented in a variety of formats so that users can view it in a number of different contexts. For instance, there is a "network view" that allows you to see the other researchers a particular person is connected to, and to what degree using a graphic that is something akin to a spider web. However, you can include or exclude connections based on your own criteria (i.e. see only people who have published more than five times with this particular person). Or you can see a "geo network" which allows you to see hot beds of researching activity on a map.

"There’s no doubt that advances in communications technology have made the Earth ‘flatter’ by helping to eliminate the physical boundaries to collaboration in the sciences," says Ingoldsby. "AIP UniPHY contributes to this phenomenon in a novel way that greatly helps to foster constructive research alliances among scientists across the globe. As this service progresses, Collexis and AIP will be adding tools and data that further enhance scientific collaboration."

As Ingoldsby says, Tuesday's public launch is just the beginning. Right now UniPHY is missing some of the basics you might expect from a social networking site, such as the ability to upload a photo. "I can assure you we’re not done," says Ingoldsby.

Before the end of the year, Ingoldsby promises UniPHY will makes many upgrades, like "the ability to flesh out the profile, to upload a photo, and add details from a Curriculum Vitae." He also says UniPHY will add other ways of connecting people, and additional career information like research grants a person has received. He says, "This is just our first attempt at doing this." And the scientific community is nothing if not tenacious.

(www.aipuniphy.org)