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Knowledge Workers

A DNS is built to deliver information to the workers that require this information to perform their jobs. These knowledge workers focus on using information to make decisions for the corporation. Ideally, over the next decade most workers in the corporation should become knowledge workers as computers take over mundane, repetitious tasks.

Knowledge workers can be any of the following:

  • Managers who review data to make corporate decisions

  • Analysts who create detailed reports of the health of the corporation

  • Workers who take orders and assist the customer in choosing a product

  • Workers who create documents that contain information valuable to the corporation, such as project design documents, project schedules, and e-mail documents

To be able to do their jobs, these knowledge workers will need to access the vast quantity of information stored on the computers inside and outside the corporation. For the most part, this information will be accessed by workers through the intranet or Internet, creating a Web workstyle. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, we will see a major revolution: corporations will build DNS's to overcome the challenges of managing, sharing, and using information important to the knowledge worker.

Goals of a DNS

Let's take a more detailed look at the DNS itself. The primary goal of the DNS is to provide business-critical information to the right place at the right time. To accomplish this, the DNS will have to perform the following tasks:

  • Provide scalability

  • Enable creation of Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Application Architecture (DNA) systems

  • Facilitate Internet use

  • Create corporate memory

  • Eliminate paper forms

  • Allow self-service applications, which will enable users to perform tasks independently

  • Capture customer feedback

  • Provide business partner communication

  • Respond to crises

All of these topics will be discussed in detail in the sections that follow.