One easy and cheap way to make knowledge workers happy is to give them some freedom in their work environments. Product design company Ideo is the poster child for such an approach. Employees there can bring in just about anything to customise and jazz up their space, from surfboards to old motorcycles. It doesn't cost Ideo anything, it makes the workers happy, and the company is one of the most creative and productive design shops on the planet.

Similarly, we found that the work-at-home question should be pretty much left up to the individual. It doesn't seem to work very well to have people work at home for extended periods - out of sight, out of mind and all that. So the company doesn't save a lot by closing office space.

We also discovered that the solutions for making knowledge work better should cut across organisational functions. If you're going to coordinate a move to virtual officing or hotelling, for example, you need to involve - at a minimum - real estate and IT people and probably HR too, since worker-supervisor relationships will be affected. You might even need some advice from legal to make sure you don't get sued when Joe Bloggs falls out of his chair in his home office. British Petroleum's "Office of the Future" initiative combines new workspaces, organisational change and technology. Executives have home audio links and videoconferencing capabilities and, in the office, wireless LANs and team spaces with "smart boards", They all have PDAs with both generic and BP-specific applications. Such mobility-enhancing technologies allow a much higher degree of work-life flexibility.

We found some in-depth examples of cross-functional coordination, though more examples are needed. Cisco Systems, for one, created a joint task force to design a new knowledge work environment. The group first explored key drivers that would influence its approach, such as Cisco's business strategy and company goals, the organisation's culture, and related initiatives, such as improving customer satisfaction. Then the HR representative described the future characteristics of Cisco's workforce, and IT's representative provided a vision for the technologies expected to impact the workplace in the next several years. Over time, the task force developed a vision for what the workplace of the future would need based on the way the workforce and technology were evolving.

Finally, of the three possible improvement domains - IT, physical space and organisational changes - IT is perhaps the least well understood. Most organisations we talked with were trying out a variety of tools for collaboration, messaging, knowledge sharing and productivity (calendaring, meeting arrangements, peer-to-peer file sharing), but there were few standards in evidence. Best practices consisted only of supplying lots of training for new knowledge work technology. Rarely was the IT experimentation accompanied by any measurement. Without that, it will be hard to make progress. We've been experimenting with IT support for knowledge work for several decades now. When will we figure out what works?

If you're making progress toward enhancing the performance of your knowledge workers or, God forbid, you've figured it all out, by all means send me an e-mail.

Tom Davenport is director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and professor of IT and management at Babson College. You can reach him at tdavenport@babson.edu