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In an era of highly interdependent organizations and institutions
that span geographic, national and cultural boundaries, businesses
face important questions of how work and organizational practices
will be transformed and how best to support that transformation.
This is not the first time that dramatic changes in technology
and organizational forms have recast people’s relationship
to the means of production, but the new era presents challenges
and opportunities specific to our particular historical, economic
and social context. We are now witnessing a redefinition of
the boundaries between organizations as companies strengthen
their interactions with suppliers, business partners, and
customers, and as they outsource more of their technology
and business processes. New developments in global connectivity,
automation, technology integration, and web services are enabling
the emergence of the extensible enterprise whose business
relationships are dynamically reconfigured in response to
changes in markets, resources, and labor force skills.
In the last 50 years of the coevolution of technology and
business innovation (http://www.almaden.ibm.com/coevolution),
we have learned that business and work transformation is as
much about people and organizational processes as it is about
technology. As we begin to tap into the power of social networks
and harness the social capital of organizations, we will enable
the acceleration of innovation and business transformation.
Likewise the emergence of new types of relationship-oriented
computing systems, such as reputation, recommendation, and
peer-support systems, will enable rapid diffusion of innovation,
alignment of human capital with business need, and facilitate
real-time negotiations.
The formation of global, extensible enterprises points to
changes in the nature of work and the relations among workers
as virtual, global teams collaborate to get work done in our
increasingly services economy. This symposium, sponsored by
the Almaden Institute, will focus on changes in the conditions
of work, in organizational and work practices, in the tools
that augment worker expertise and know-how, and in the global
and social consequences of these new workplace realities.
We invite researchers, business and technology practitioners,
and policy makers to join us in exploring together the future
of work in the era of the global, extensible enterprise.
Please contact the IBM
Almaden Research Center with any inquiries.
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