Peter Drucker Envisioned Social Media Impact on Project Management

Peter Drucker is a Business legend whose enduring work and advancement in management has made a lasting mark.

Many today consider the "Father of modern day management."  One of Drucker's notable achievements was the development of the concept: Information Worker -- a name he coined long before the internet was born to society.

Originally, project management was designed for manual work, like constructing a building or implementing a new system.  As America and many parts of the world departed from the industrial age and from being largely a manufacturing society, Drucker realized and understood the significance of knowledge sharing and how this new role would dramatically change project management and the world that we live in.

Drucker who was born in Vienna, Austria, focused his writings on how organizations can bring out the best in people.  One key way of empowering your personnel is providing them with information.

The knowledge worker can be found across different mediums and curriculums from engineer, teacher, lawyer, physician to database manager.  Though their experiences and skillsets are diverse, they all share the ability to be able to interpret information in their respective knowledge area.

Despite their training and experience, knowledge workers are encouraged and in some ways required to engage in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing across national, organizational and company boundaries.  Even expert, high-paid workers like lawyers and doctors need to share information and solicit advice from others in the field.

Empowering the masses with information will allow workers to be more effective, making less mistakes and ultimately a lot more productive.

The need for knowledge sharing in the late 1990's led to the development of Knowledge Management as a discipline that was developed and embraced in the workplace.

Today with a plethora of social media tools on the internet, information is available not only to the experts, but also to the mainstream: workers and even the general public have access to information that was once unaccessible and KM as how knew it has largely disappeared.

So empowering the masses with relevant information that is available at the finger tips will allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

In the workplace, companies can be innovative by embracing the latest Web 2.0 tools and make them available to their employees.

Tools like blogs, Wikis and even social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious provides quick and accurate information empowers the knowledge worker to compete successfully in a global environment.

Project managers should understand that large projects, like business is more of a social science.