When Thinking Matters in the Workplace

Executives and managers already know that smart people need freedom to innovate and create. Automation of their work, done haphazardly, can put strait-jackets on your most creative people. You don't want to put in place technology that micro-manages your knowledge workers. "Robots don't innovate."

"When Thinking Matters in the Workplace" is an in-depth review of how knowledge workers and innovators get their work done. It gives you the background of complex organizational behavior and matches that up with mature management approaches as well as business architecture. Then, it surveys the different kinds of technologies you might use to help innovators collaborate and get their work done. Naive approaches can lead down paths that actually make it harder for knowledge workers to get things done. Care must be taken to provide support that increases their productivity. This book provides some guidelines to help avoid the worst pitfalls and to take the best advantage of an adaptive approach for supporting knowledge workers.

Written as an antidote to the office automation and business process management approaches, this book shows how a case management approach can be applied in almost any field where knowledge workers are needed. It breaks out the different factors that are important in case management. More importantly, it show the two kinds of case management, one for knowledgeable professionals and the other for true innovators. It explains how automation can have the effect of restricting what people do, which might be fine for a factory, but can be very costly if you are counting on flexibility to beat the competition.