The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence

Chapter 9 A View over the Horizon

“The most important … contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker. The most valuable assets of the 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution … will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.

“Knowledge-worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st-century management challenges. In the developed countries, it is their first survival requirement. In no other way can the developed countries hope ...