As you can see form the initial weeks' readings, as well as from your professional experience, the business climate, organizational structures, and workforce dynamics are radically changing. Not only is there a different way of conducting business and, thus, performing, there is a different way of perceiving business strategy, organizational structure, operational procedures, leadership, and employees.
This is the era of the knowledge work and the knowing organization.
People are hired for their ability to generate and apply knowledge. An organization is intelligent; i.e., contains valuable knowledge that must be able to be accessed when needed. It needs to be managed strategically for information drives and organizations and knowledge powers it.
This does not merely mean storing data that can be turned into useable information when needed. It means structuring the business organization as a vibrant social network, a dynamic web of knowledge sharing relationships that enable creativity, innovative problem solving, and decisive decision making and action taking.
As discussed in the first blog, organizations are a network of internal and external people, teams, and organizations. They are a system of interactive and collaborative partnerships. The organization is a knowing organism. The knowing organization is a learning organization. For more on this subject consult C. W. Choo's work on the knowing organization as the learning organization.
Knowledge, though, resides primarily in people, and work gets done in social networks.
Work is performed in a significantly different manner than in past decades due to technological applications and the emphasis on knowledge sharing. Thus, the notion of employee has been reshaped and the definition of workforce. Now, both people and technology are intrinsically necessary for organizations to function; i.e., to operate and to partner with outside organizations and groups in order to reach their goals. If either are removed from a business enterprise (or not performing properly)the organization does not function well.
Think about it. People make up organizations. Organizations are social entities with a culture and common purpose, diverse talented people networked in order to achieve a stated mission. If a team member is absent or not understanding the project, the team can under perform or even fail.
But an organization is not just people, because they cannot perform their jobs without a set of tools.
Some form of information, communication and collaboration technology is a part of every aspect of today's work. If the organization's computer system goes down, employees, including managers, cannot do their job. Work ceases.
So, the workforce today is people and techology woven into one consistent system. Employees do not merely use digital tools as in the past. The "actual employee" is the human person and the digital tool as one entity. This means that the human resource infrastructure and the technological infrastructure must be in sync with each other.
One could say they must be one infrastructure, a sociotechnological networking, information processing, knowledge management, and decision making infrastructure. This is the 21st century's competitive business enterprise.
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