Rikio Maruta

Transforming knowledge workers into innovation workers to improve corporate productivity

This paper deals with the productivity improvement of knowledge work. The productivity of knowledge work is improved through innovations with knowledge creation. The author points out that knowledge is created through the knowledge workers mental activity involving the interaction of three important factors, i.e., information, knowledge and insight. Knowledge workers can augment their capability to exploit knowledge and information through their personal learning efforts and/or through access to appropriate external knowledge and information sources. Although importance of sharing information and knowledge has been widely discussed in earlier studies for knowledge management and social networking services, there were only few discussions on the importance of the third factor, insight. The author discusses that insight is the key for knowledge creation and it has a special nature different from the other two: it cannot be acquired through learning, but can become usable by activating undeveloped portions of native capabilities. Only knowledge workers who have good insight have the awareness to realize innovations necessary in business. These people are newly defined as Innovation Workers. In order to substitute for inefficient conventional on-the-job trainings to nurture innovation workers, a Timed-PDCA concept is proposed in this paper. The use of the Timed-PDCA concept makes it possible to visualize the progressive status of knowledge work as well as on-going thoughts of workers, and also periodically to enforce the worker for seriously evaluating the current situation and revising the action plan towards the final goal. Repeating such a process helps cultivate undeveloped portions of native capabilities of the worker. Visualization of work progress and workers thoughts enable supervisors to coach workers in a timely and appropriate manner. Thus, use of the Timed-PDCA concept makes it possible to pursue productivity improvement in the current works including nurturing innovation workers concurrently. Although its application can be usefully made on any knowledge works to be managed on the time axis, managing the business-to-business sales process was chosen as the first concrete application. The paper introduces the development details of the system and its managerial effects after deployment.

A novel intuitive GUI method for user-friendly operation

A novel Push-Pin icon is introduced as an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) in associations from free layouts of printed paper sheets on a pin-up board. It is shown that necessary commands for GUI implementation can be represented by Push-Pin states. Detailed state transition diagrams for actual GUI implementation based on this icon are given. Superiority of the new GUI method to the conventional one was demonstrated in a typical application. It is firmly believed that use of the proposed method will significantly improve work efficiency of computer users.