Quest for best of all possible worlds

By ALISON HORWOOD

It's 2011. A rash of merger-mania has left only 35 global companies - Daimler-Chryslerbishi, Coke-Donalds-Tricon and Sony-Nokia-Columbia among them.

They are run largely by e-lancers - computer-savvy freelancers - selected on a project-by-project basis by independent assessors.

Their lifelines are telephones with digital TV, video-conferencing and positioning systems as standard accessories.

The capture of knowledge is so important that strict laws in the European Union govern how companies manage it.

To escape this, many put their precious data on servers in other countries, mainly Asian, which do not have restrictions.

This scenario, the world of the aging e-lancers, is one of five put forward by the European Knowledge Management Forum in a paper, Trends and Visions in KM.

The forum, made up of European companies and learning institutes, wants to establish networks to share developments in knowledge management.

By this, it means identifying, managing and sharing information - including databases, documents, policies and procedures - as well as some informed crystal ball-gazing.

More than ever, knowledge is power. The paper says its study of 200 large firms shows 83 per cent are formally involved in knowledge management, and more than a quarter have a chief knowledge officer.

Some things about the world of work in 2011 can be predicted, say the experts.

For example, the cost of technology will still be falling.

Harder to predict is business stability, how information is stored and passed on, how we communicate and how much people embrace the idea of constantly learning new skills.

The experts have melded the predictable and the speculative together to arrive at five possibilities for our working world in 2011.

The guerilla world is a small-is-beautiful, self-centred place in which people look after number one.

Everything is hooked up through the internet - including the fridge and coffee machine - and technology allows people to band with others when it suits.

Business also features small and flexible guerilla-like units grouping and regrouping. More than two-thirds of buying and selling takes place through digital marketplaces.

In the divided world, big is beautiful. Each industry - steel, car manufacturing and the like - is dominated by no more than four or five companies.

But the gap between the haves and have-nots is yawning.

People are either powerful "knowledge workers" or marginalised "non-knowledge workers".

The non-knowledge workers do what they are told, have no discretion and little motivation or job satisfaction.

People have to pay for knowledge, and prices to extract it from servers are fixed by "knowledge monopolists".

In I want the world and I want it now, marketing is king, packaging more important than product. Because work is niche and small-scale, and done from home, differences between people's wealth and status are so slight that they invent sub-cultures to rediscover a sense of belonging.

People identify with others because of the brands they choose.

Sales and marketing is one of the few areas still offering well-paid corporate work: major employers account for less than half of all jobs.

Governments cannot control such a nimble working world where people can slip effortlessly through cyber space and between countries, so there are moves to tax the virtual economy on a world-wide basis.

In the my home is my castle world, the world economy has broken down. IT and media haven't converged, and people pick and choose the technologies they need.

TV, computer and mobile communications never intertwined.

The big companies have split into small, flexible, self-organised subsidiaries.

Ecologically, small, green spots have thrived but in most of the world, people have given up fighting pollution.

So where to from here? Dr Sally Davenport, director of graduate studies at Victoria University's management school, says: "The point with scenarios is to say, okay, if this is what the future might be, what do we do now to either get to that scenario or avoid it?"

It is only recently that frameworks and concepts have come about for the strategic management of business knowledge, she says.

What an organisation does with information is the key: "The difference between information and knowledge is the difference between data and wisdom."

Oil company Royal Dutch/Shell made the tool famous - once to anticipate the Arab oil embargo, and again to prepare for the drop in oil prices during the 1980s.

Davenport and other researchers have studied New Zealand companies to see what gives them the edge.

Relationships, reputation, innovation, learning processes, technologies, production capability and culture were examined.

Many firms brought together many of these to provide not just a high-tech product, but a knowledge-based solution to a customer's problem, she says.

The keys are clever design, creativity, breadth of specialist skills, unique combinations of technology, exceeding customer expectations, high-quality products and packaging, service based on trust and honesty, and fast, flexible manufacturing.

For example, she says, when the Gallagher Group entered the Netherlands with its fencing products, it ran a hotline offering information on New Zealand's unique practices in low-cost controlled grazing.

"This knowledge is taken for granted in New Zealand," says Davenport, "but the willingness to share it helps to differentiate the product in the marketplace and build loyalty with customers."

Sharing the knowledge was also an important way to establish what interested customers most.