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66 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

and variants: Henry Ford was reported to have once said, ‘My customers can
have any colour car, as long as it is black’!
Finally, in relation to knowledge processes, a global business needs to ensure
that it focuses on sharing knowledge and learning so that expensive reinvention
is prevented. ICTs such as e-mail and teleconferencing can help to facilitate
dialogue among professionals so that learning is shared. This is the aim of the
Knowledge Management initiative at BankCo, described later in Chapter 7. Of
course, this is not to say that globalization, and especially attempts at globaliza-
tion, did not occur before developments in the Internet and the World Wide
Web. History is replete with examples of nations, if not corporations, attempt-
ing to expand their global empire. Nevertheless, it is clear that advances in ICTs
have played a role in advances in the globalization of work, as well as in the other
features of the new organizational forms discussed above.

>> FACILITATING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE USING ICT
ICTs may potentially support organizational change in relation to all three of
the imperatives defined by Earl and Fenny (1996), but we have already consid-
ered how ICT will not directly determine or even indirectly influence change
independent of the human actors involved. We look briefly in this section at
some ways in which desired organizational change might be promoted.
In understanding how ICT is used in knowledge-intensive organizations we
should begin by recognizing that a key feature of today’s ICT, including KMS, is
that most are packages that support knowledge processes – for example, knowl-
edge sharing across the whole organization. This is rather different to traditional
ICT that was developed to support specific work tasks (the pace of assembly
line production, for example). Packages are adopted by organizations ‘off-the-
shelf’ so to speak, and can be configured, within specific constraints, just as an
off-the-shelf suit can be slightly modified by a tailor. The advice, however, is to
not customize such packages or attempt to completely modify the software to
suit the particular organization (just as it may not be sensible to buy an off-the-
shelf suit and then try and completely redesign it). This implementation without
modification is referred to as the ‘vanilla’ system. We discuss this more fully
in Chapter 7. A good example of a currently popular package that is aimed at
facilitating knowledge processes and that many organizations are trying to adopt
is sharepoint. Sharepoint is a Microsoft product which claims, according to the
Microsoft website, to ‘provide a single, integrated location where employees can
efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search
for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow, and lever-
age business insight to make better-informed decisions’.
The integrated nature of a package, like sharepoint or any other enterprise-
wide system, means that ideally user representatives from different parts of
the organization should be involved in the implementation project. However,
given the complexity of such systems, it is perhaps not surprising that so many

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