The Problem: Companies compete fiercely to find and retain knowledge workers, often accumulating thousands of them. Then they experience that they are not productive as hoped ....
The solution in short: organize workers around projects rather than jobs. In the article you find headlines like: The Rise of the Decision Factors, Productivity in the Decision Factory, Toward the knowledge algorithm ..
IMO, this is based on a principle misunderstanding: knowledge work (and innovation) is not industrial work but lab work. The factory is a wrong metaphor. A factory is the result of a search of perfection, an operational representation of an optimal competence (its driver is efficiency), in a factory knowledge is codified. But knowledge work in its deeper sense (if its objective is better decision making for innovation) is characterized by stepping into the knew, where nothing is clear, no rules, no systematic, no formal system are available.
Pointedly speaking, factory organizers maximize productivity and do not particularly like dynamic and creativity. It is difficult to see possibilities in a factory.
Our UnRisk FACTORY is a highly automated valuation factory supporting decisions of risk managers. But it is not a decision factory. Decisions are results of a post process transforming the many results of the FACTORY into insight.
Risk managers are not industrialists, consequently we are not industrialists.
Edit 1: I am a mathematician. How could I say say: knowledge cannot be formalized? But a mathematical decision factory could also lead to a perfect-competence trap. The spiral of mathematical innovation is the play with theorems (formal), examples, new abstractions, new theorems, new examples, .. and so on.
Edit 2: the article is probably more about knowledge transfer among a quite homogeneous group, say for new young members, .. and not the transformation of knowledge in something "better". But still: we learn from turbulences, not codes ...
