Agenda
Abstract
Agenda We're all knowledge workers now aren't we? California's prisons are home to some of the toughest inmates in the world, and if any more compelling proof were needed that we are all knowledge workers now, it is to those prisons we must turn. Last spring, Touch Sonic Technologies, a manufacturer of touch-screen kiosks, announced that it had teamed up with law and business database provider LexisNexis to provide online services in five Californian 'correctional facilities'. To be sure, the terminals required some modifications not specified in the average law firm such as shatter-proof glass screens, to ensure that the inmates couldn't use the shards as weapons. Set that aside, however, and you are left with a typically mixed community, as anxious as anyone else for access to the best and most up to date legal information. They're also clearly com- pletely comfortable using online technology to acquire it. If that doesn't demon- strate that we are all knowledge workers now, what does? Well, the spread of knowledge capability across the developing world, perhaps. A report earlier this year from the IT consultancy Gartner (reported in the Financial Times of 17 March) predicted that developing countries were presenting