Knowledge Work and Information Technology

This Working Paper is the first in a series of reports being prepared as part of a year-long research project funded by the Fujitsu Research Institute and the sponsors of the Fisher Center for Management and Information Technology. Here we discuss the need for empirical research on the behaviors and performance of a category of worker known generically as " knowledge workers. " We review past research on knowledge workers and other white-collar employees, focusing the on dearth of knowledge about what kinds of tasks these individuals and groups engage in to acquire, process, and communicate knowledge, how they spend their time, and what information technology tools they employ to carry out their work. We also review briefly the literature on white collar productivity. We propose taxonomies for assessing and describing knowledge work, and for the information technology tools that these workers use. Finally, we describe our plans for conducting interviews and observational studies of two distinctively different types of knowledge workers—claims adjusters in the insurance industry and product development engineers in the automobile industry. We anticipate finding very different patterns of work and technology use in these two groups, and will use these differences to develop and test our models of how individuals and groups acquire, process, and disseminate information, and what impact their behaviors and tools have on their performance and productivity.

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