Knowledge work is deeply splintered in most organizations.
Knowledge work is specialized, and because it is so specialized, it is deeply splintered in most organizations. Managing all of these specialties effectively is a big challenge for knowledge-based organizations. For example, hospitals may use outsourcing, PEOs (Professional Employer Organizations), and temp agencies to manage, place, and satisfy the highly specialized knowledge worker. This results in outsourcing part of the management task. The modern hospital provides a great example of the management complexities created by the splintering of knowledge work and the resultant use of outsourcing, PEOs as well as temp agencies.
Even a fair-size community hospital with 275 to 300 beds will have approximately 3,000 people working for it. Close to half will be knowledge workers of one kind or another. Two of these groups, nurses and specialists in the business departments, are fairly large, numbering several hundred people each. But there are around thirty “paramedic specialties”: the physical therapists and the people in the clinical lab; the psychiatric case workers; the oncological technicians; the two dozen people who prepare people for surgery; the people in sleep clinics; the ultrasound technicians; the cardiac-clinic technicians; and many, many more. Managing all these specialties makes the modern hospital the most complex of modern organizations.
ACTION POINT: Identify functions in your organization that could be outsourced. Make plans to outsource these functions and to monitor performance and quality.