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Management tradition developed by F. W. Taylor, introduced in Chapter 1. Thus,
while Taylor sought to transfer the knowledge that existed in worker’s heads to
their managers, and the Ford production system sought to transfer workers’ and
to an extent managers’ knowledge to the assembly-line technology, Enterprise
Systems seek to transfer knowledge of presumed ‘best practices’ across an indus-
try sector by embedding the knowledge in a software package (Gratton and
Ghoshal, 2005). Moreover, like Scientific Management and Fordist production,
an Enterprise Systems seeks to impose the same kind of standardizing control on
the ways work gets done, even in the context of knowledge work.
As we saw in Chapter 1, Taylor’s so-called Scientific Management philoso-
phy can be understood as an early attempt at Knowledge Management. Taylor
believed that it was necessary to extract the knowledge from the workers and
give it to managers who would then devise standardized work processes that
each worker would be forced to follow. In this sense, Taylor supposed that there
was ‘one best way’ to accomplish tasks – very like the current philosophy behind
Enterprise Systems packages. We also saw in Chapter 1 how Scientific Manage-
ment and the related Fordist production system had negative effects on the work-
ers. More importantly, perhaps, such approaches also restrict flexibility since it is
much more difficult to change workflows when control is embedded in complex
production technologies that cost a lot, in terms of time and money, to change.
This is demonstrated today very clearly with many very large car companies, espe-
cially in the United States, being very slow to respond to what has been a fairly
dramatic change in customer preferences for cars – changing production lines
from producing gas-guzzling SUVs, which customers no longer want because of
high fuel costs, to small cars, which are more attractive because they are energy
efficient, takes several years to accomplish, for example. Dramatic losses in market
share are occurring in those companies that did not foresee this change and that,
therefore, are not able to make adjustments quickly enough. These limitations on
work and workers can be similarly recognized in today’s very popular Enterprise
Systems, discussed next.

>> ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS AND THE SPREAD OF ‘BEST
PRACTICE’ KNOWLEDGE

While some of the underlying assumptions about human nature were clearly
naïve in these early Scientific Management/Fordist approaches to managing
work, the general idea of standardizing work practices through the use of tech-
nology remains dominant, only today standardization covers not just manual
work but also a lot of non-manual work, including what might be considered
knowledge work, and occurs through the use of ICT rather than through design-
ing specific work tools, like spades, or machines, like assembly lines. Enterprise
Systems exemplify this trend.
Enterprise Systems have their roots in earlier technologies for managing
production processes – Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP),

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