"The IT revolution has been about producing a faster typewriter, about more efficient administration," said Kyte at the Gartner Symposium and IT Expo 2002 in Sydney today. "It's been an administrative revolution."
"If you look at what IT has delivered to the knowledge worker in the last 30 years, it has failed [to increase productivity]," said Kyte. He said the only thing the IT world had offered knowledge workers was e-mail, which had not improved productivity.
According to Kyte, businesses can become too focussed on administrative efficiency. "You need to be careful you do not continue optimising things when it does not address critical business goals," he said.
"Knowledge worker productivity needs to be improved," added Kyte.
The difficulty of measuring the contribution of knowledge workers to a company increases the challenge of attracting capital, according to Kyte. Analysts, accountants and investors have not determined how to value a company's knowledge workers in the same way they can value fixed capital such as manufacturing plants. Kyte expects it to be 15 or 20 years before analysts, accountants and investors work out how to put knowledge workers on the books.
Smart companies now articulate the way they value their knowledge workers in annual reports, said Kyte.
Gartner believes the sustainable competitive advantage will go to those companies that acknowledge, value, work on and improve knowledge worker productivity.
