Thanks to Aixa Almonte for pointing out this excellent article on how important networks have become for today's knowledge workers.

By Patti Shank

Why? Much of today’s work isn’t predictable or routinized. Knowledge- and information-era work increasingly involves …

• Tasks done alongside other tasks under complex conditions and with increasing distractions.
• Competing demands and the need to continually prioritize and reprioritize.
• Complex decisions made with changing and sometimes contradictory information.

Under these conditions, it’s impossible to memorize all the critical facts (they keep changing) or automate needed skills (they keep changing, too). And performance support is oftentimes more critical than training.

Because the amount of information workers have to deal with keeps growing and is continually changing, there is a growing need to support performance under these conditions. Workers increasingly need ongoing, unlimited, current, and relevant streams of information and ways to find exactly what is needed and make sense of it quickly. Formal training approaches (including online learning) are still helpful — but often, they don’t go far enough. Good resources and help that can be accessed immediately, as needed, often are more valuable than (a) no instruction and help, (b) inadequate instruction and help, and/or (c) waiting for instruction that will occur too early or late to be useful. When work is complex and information is constantly changing, there’s simply too much to know.

To address this problem, (especially younger) workers are building networks of people and information sources that help them find and make use of critical information as it is needed. Social applications like instant messaging, blogs, wikis, VoIP, online project portals, social book-marking, and other tools increasingly are being called into play by these workers, with or without organizational approval, to support workers’ skill development and information needs.

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