Performance measurement and management of professional and knowledge work (PDF)

This e-book contains seven chapters that capture the state-of-the-art in performance measurement and management of professional and knowledge work. (1) The famous comment from Solow (1987) "e;you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics"e; sums up the so-called "e;productivity paradox"e; where the link between IT investment and increased productivity is ambiguous. The first chapter looks to clarify issues of performance measurement and provides an up-to-date economic analysis of the figures. (2) The phrase "e;work smarter, not harder"e; is often used as a management maxim for the knowledge economy - but how do you do this? In the second chapter the authors develop an audit tool to analyse current knowledge-work practices and help to identify those aspects of development initiatives that are "e;smarter"e;. (3) In the modern work environment, professionals are expected to "e;go the extra mile"e; and display extra-role performance (ERP) that goes beyond the base-level task performance expected of their normal role. The third chapter studies the impact of different levels of school autonomy on teacher's task performance and ERP - in particular they compare public and charter (private) schools. (4) Talent management is a burgeoning area of research and practice that involves identifying the talent in the organisation's human resource and developing these assets so that the organisation's performance improves. The fourth chapter focuses on a traditional area of knowledge work, that of law, and proposes a new approach to analysing appraisal and assessment centre data that can underpin talent management.(5) The increasing popularity of talent management has exposed the limited understanding of how the management of an individual's talents feeds through in to employee performance. This chapter sets out to plug this gap by developing a conceptual framework that integrates the existing knowledge base. (6) The productivity of knowledge workers is clearly a key contributor to the knowledge economy. This chapter analyses empirical data and identifies the factors that contribute to the productivity of scientists and technical professionals working in publicly-funded R&D. (7) The final chapter concentrates on the use of the (ubiquitous) balanced scorecard (BSC) to measure and control knowledge work. A critical view of BSC's contribution is developed and an improved approach put forward that links BSC with the operational control systems such as project management.