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Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Knowledge Management and E-Business in the New Millennium

The following opinion piece recently appeared in a compilation of views of luminaries in the knowledge and intellectual capital arena in response to trends related to the knowledge economy; the knowledge-intensive enterprise; and the knowledge worker. Reference: What is the Big Idea? Knowledge and Its Future [Anticipating Surprises], in Knowledge Inc.: The Executive Report on Knowledge, Technology & Performance The Millennium Issue, Vol. 5, No. 1., January 2000.

Ongoing synthesis of the two phenomena currently known as Knowledge Management and E-Business is expected to continue the transformation of organizations and work in the increasingly digital economy.

Involved in defining the Knowledge Management 'movement', tinkering with defining the E-Business angle on the intangible assets that defy traditional economics, and just having crossed the Y2K barrier while being 'global virtual' for the last five years, I stop to reflect: What's the Big Idea? The big idea, in my thinking, should help us make some sense of the apparent chaos inherent in new wave knowledge, technology breakthroughs, business model innovation and the endless roller coaster of the IPOs, tech-stocks and the dot-com enterprises emerging faster than fire-flies emerge on a dark night. The big idea should also help us make sense of several characteristics of what is being often referred to as the new knowledge economy: an economy of digital goods and services existing side by side with click-and-mortar companies; an economy represented by increasing focus on firms' intellectual capital and intangible assets; an economy of 'free goods' competing for qualified eyeballs and mind-share of global consumer markets; and redefinition of organizations and work as they have been defined in traditional management theory and practice.

What's the Big Idea? Simply speaking, the big idea is about the change of unprecedented proportions that the world's organizations, managers and knowledge-workers are encountering and will be encountering in the emerging world of business. In the good ol' world of business, the pace of change was relatively predictable with some level of certainty. It was comforting when the 'programmable logic' could be embedded in the information, control and performance systems; the procedure manuals, rules of thumbs and best practices, and in the minds of managers and workers who would have comfort in following 'tried and tested' business practices. However, the roller coaster of change in the business environment is hitting a new level of G-force and the tracks of the roller coaster are becoming increasingly murky in the fog that is enveloping the emerging future. Some organizational experts have called the 'new change' in terms of 'radical discontinuous pace of change' while others have tried to describe it in terms of the 'world of re-everything.' Some early denizens of the Net have often described the recent pace of change in terms of 'changing car tires while driving in top gear.' My belief is that they haven't seen nothing yet! The forthcoming era of change could be more aptly described as 're-building the car from ground up while driving in top gear.' These metaphors are anticipated to evoke into one's mind pictures that are associated with the level and pace of learning and unlearning and the speed of implementation as strategy gets defined in real time.

What used to be predictable, could be planned in advance, could be programmed in computer systems or human minds with some degree of reliability for any significant duration of time in the comfortable world of 'programmed logic' - is suddenly becoming less relevant to competitive sustenance and survival. The new mantra is 'everything is up for grabs' including all tried and tested thumb rules, best practices and business models that seemed to work fine in the post-industrial era. Many important questions are unraveling one's comfort in the 'programmed logic' of the just past era. How does one program systems that have the capability of questioning their own logic and revising their assumptions in real time as they sense dynamic changes in the environment? Such systems seemed to have worked fine in the post-industrial era that was characterized by some long-term notion of strategy and the feedback and control systems were able to monitor and manage the future with some level of predictability. However, increasingly the notion of strategy has shifted from prediction of the future to 'anticipation of surprise.' How does one translate the increasingly complex interaction of business and technology related changes into computational models based on bits and bytes fast enough to 'anticipate the future,' if it is possible at all? How does one predict a future that doesn't compute? How does one envisage a world in which most programs will need to be re-tested and re-defined as the dynamically changing reality of the business environment questions major underlying assumptions? This emerging world seems to assume Herculean proportions compared to the recent skirmish of the world with the very "predictable" 'Y2K bug.'

Where is the new world of 're-everything' anticipated to lead us. Here is one possible view of the emerging future. The mega-surprises [such as the biggest merger 'yet' in corporate history between AOL and Time Warner] of today will be dwarfed by the emergence of new hot-stocks and e-businesses that will challenge the current concepts of scale and scope. As the 'increasing returns' of intangible assets become more prominent, one may see a pronounced shift from the venture capital folks to global merchants of knowledge capital. The knowledge intensity of businesses is expected to increase tremendously as 'brick-and-mortar' entities morph into 'click-and-mortar' avatars while new 'global virtual Net-prises' overshadow the global corporate landscape. One may even speculate that organizations of tomorrow may even defy the current logic of B2B and B2C models as commerce becomes integrated with learning, living and working for members of the mega-corporations, SMEs as well as the 'solos' with digital storefronts along the information highway.

The microcosmic representation of the self-adaptive enterprise may finally be realized in the self-empowered human intrapreneur -- often working as a free agent in a self-employed capacity or as a free agent contractor within or outside formal organizational boundaries. The newly empowered human will live in a world of immense choice that may often imply living with immense risks and immense returns. The knowledge worker choice of -- what to do, where to do and when to do -- as the 'anything, anytime, anywhere' economy provides the ultimate incarnation of what we currently know as flexwork, telework and virtual work. The choice will not be easy for most who have been traditionally ensconced in the increasingly mythical shell of stability and security as they suddenly find that they are travelling at warp speed into a future of infinite choices. The feeling will be simultaneously exhilarating and unnerving: the joy of choice being blended with the apprehension of making one's own choices and having to live with them.

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