age their knowledge and skills. In these organizations, knowledge will be at the bot-
tom rather than at the top, and decisions will be made where the work is performed.
Knowledge-based organizations (KBOs) will be much flatter (fewer levels) and
leaner than hierarchies. The role of top management will be to provide a business vi-
sion for coordination and synchronization, and to develop an organization’s culture,
rather than making decisions and providing direction as they do now. Drucker likens
KBOs to hospital emergency room teams and string quartets in that they will be or-
ganized around the work to be performed (a project-driven organization). An impli-
cation of these new organization forms is that they will require the rethinking of tra-
ditional management processes, such as supervision, control, and employee
development.
(ii) Reengineering Organizations. Hammer^25 maintains that businesses are not tak-
ing advantage of technology because they tend to follow current procedures when
building IT applications rather than rethinking the way their work is performed. He
notes that the division of labor has gone too far—most workers perform only part of
a job and spend needless effort in coordination. Many tasks that are done are unnec-
essary; they have simply been handed down over time. To cope with this situation,
firms should examine their basic business activities so as to recognize those that truly
add value. These activities should be retained and others discarded. Organizations
and business processes should be redesigned to give workers complete jobs, to cap-
ture information once, and to place decision-making authority where the work is per-
formed. This leads to a case form of work organization where workers handle com-
plete cases or are responsible for all of the contact with a class of client.
(iii) Groupware. The model behind most office support software is a singleuser; in
groupware, the model changes to multipleusers. An implication of this is that people
canshareinformation. Groupware is computer application software that supports peo-
ple working together, cooperatively. One of the most widely used Groupware products
isNotes,developed by the Lotus Corporation (now part of the IBM Corporation).
LOTUS NOTES. Notes is a client-server software product that has facilities for con-
structing a distributed database of documents that workers can share. Authorized
users can change the database and changes are propagated among the Notes servers
by a process called replication. A document may contain text, graphics, or video.
Users can customize the way a database appears by altering their view of it. Notes
also includes e-mail with attachments, and strong security provisions for logging on
to the network and for accessing information on a Notes server.
INTRANET. An alternative to a proprietary groupware product, such as Notes, is an in-
tranet, the use of Internet protocols and programs (see section 28.5(a)(iv)) within a
firm in order to share information. Intranets have become popular because of the
large number of free and commercial products available for the construction of Web
pages (compound multiobject databases that can be shared), Web servers, and Web
browsers. Since almost everyone who uses the Internet has a Web browser, it is a con-
venience to use that software to read internal as well as external information.
28.5 NEW BUSINESS PARADIGMS 28 • 17(^25) Hammer, 1990.