REVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION AND MANAGEMENT

Revolution of Communication and Administrative Management

Revolution of Communication and Administrative Management

Introduction

The value of a business increasingly lies not in factories or fleets of trucks, the sort of assets that appear on the balance sheet and are easy to value and manage. It lies in intangibles: brands, patents, franchises, software, research programmes, ideas, expertise. "Knowledge" assets such as these account for perhaps six out of every seven dollars of corporate market value. Managing any of these assets is difficult, but the hardest ones to deal with are those that employees carry around in their heads.

The company of the future will concentrate on managing people more than on managing physical assets. It will focus on trying to get the best from its knowledge capital. That will mean understanding what knowledge resides with its employees (and, sometimes, with its suppliers and customers) and its other knowledge assets. The importance of pooling the skills of the workforce will grow and new ways of building on the learning that goes on in companies will be discovered.

Happily, the communications revolution presents new opportunities to do this. It also presents new challenges. For example, Internet technologies help to spread and share ideas. But they also allow ideas to move easily beyond a company, creating a need for protection. Yet too much protection of intellectual property rights can stifle innovation. So governments and companies need to be able to strike a balance between openness and protection (Daft 2001).

The development of sophisticated databases and intranets gives companies new opportunities to build a core of knowledge that they can access globally. The enormous capacity that Internet technologies create makes it possible to store vast amounts of information (in text and increasingly in voice and video). Yet most of this information is in cumbersome and unstructured forms. Deciding what to store and how to store it will require more tools and wise judgment.

Discussion

Internet technologies also provide new opportunities for companies to manage people and their intrinsic knowledge and skills, on which they are becoming increasingly reliant for competitive advantage. One of the biggest challenges for corporate management will be to find ways to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of the changes taking place in the workplace. Technologies provide opportunities; managers must develop a corporate approach that makes the most of them.

In addition, the focus and the process of innovation are changing. As a result, creating knowledge becomes a vital competitive advantage. Research and development, once concentrated mainly in universities and defense, is now much more widespread. Services, and especially financial and business services, tend to be leaders in information-technology R&D.

For the first time, it becomes easy to coordinate innovation in several locations at once. The number of new patents issued, both in the United States and Europe, has speeded up -- partly because the law has changed to allow patents of new products, such as software in the United States, but partly because companies are simply innovating ...