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nizations are increasingly working in collaborative alliances and partner-
ships with other organizations or using outsourcing arrangements to service
particular internal requirements. This enables organizations to innovate
much more quickly since they can access knowledge and expertise that are
not held internally. These linkages between networking and innovation will
be explored further in Chapters 8 and 9.
5. Globalization of business: Organizations are increasingly geographically dis-
tributed, working on a global rather than a national basis. This has been
achieved either through the acquisition of businesses in other countries (as
in the BankCo case in Chapter 7), through partnership arrangements, or
through internal international growth. This allows them to capitalize on
global market opportunities and so potentially grow in size and profitability.

While developments in ICTs have not determined the changes outlined above
(and explored further in the chapters that follow), they have made these options
more feasible and have opened up global markets for all kinds of organization as
well as opportunities for organizations to work together in the development of
innovations. For example, Ozcelik (2008) describes how not-for-profit organi-
zations are using the Internet to increase access to information to widely distrib-
uted stakeholders, to facilitate interaction with their stakeholders and to improve
their fund-raising efforts. The Internet, in turn, allows potential donors to get
far more information about the various organizations they might give to than
was previously available (see, e.g. www.globalgiving.com – a website where orga-
nizations anywhere in the world can post their social projects for which they are
looking for funding). Moreover, these new forms of organizing, supported by
ICT, can be more conducive to knowledge work and to the support of knowl-
edge workers, albeit as already seen they do not automatically ‘free’ employees
from organizational constraints.
In understanding the role of ICT in relation to these new organizational forms,
Earl and Fenny (1996) describe three imperatives for successful global business –
global efficiency, local responsiveness and transfer of learning – and analyse
how ICT can potentially have a role in relation to all three imperatives. Global
efficiency implies that an organization coordinates and consolidates its various
activities so that it achieves economies of scale. This requires, for example, the
collection of comparative performance information from its operations around
the globe. Global ICTs such as ERP systems – discussed further in Chapter 7 –
allow this information to be collected in a common form so that these global
efficiency decisions can be made.
Local responsiveness implies that organizations must respond to the
requirements and idiosyncrasies of local markets – the ‘global car’ needs to be
modified to suit the particular local conditions where it is sold, for example.
Production system ICTs which support high variety are helpful here. This
philosophy is obviously very different from the earlier mass production era
outlined in Chapter 1, where single products were produced with few options

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