• Joachim Doering
  The Future of Work and Learning in Distributed e-company Networks
• Dr. Loerg Heistermann
  Value Enhancement by Converting KarstadtQuelle into a Learning Organization

List of thesis
Currently, in every industry new growth opportunities for knowledge businesses arise. These opportunities cannot be seen through old economy eyes and not be seized by old economy hands.

With the deconstruction of known value chains, organizations need to shift from solid hierarchical structures to (e-) company-networks.

These organizations will be driven by e-lancers, mobile knowledge workers that can be seen as investors of human capital with a company-size of one.

To seize these opportunities, knowledge management and organizational development has to be far more than simple reengineering or IT-management.

The challenge: transformation towards international knowledge business, to service and people business, managed in networked organizations Therefore organizational practices and knowledge management converge to one connected field of work: Transformation Management.

On knowledge

1. Organizations today need to be prepared for the new quality of competition that characterizes this new era, the knowledge era.
2. We have to drive knowledge-based business transformation, i.e. (re-)invent the vision and strategy, the products, processes, structures and systems for the new business with knowledge.
3. Knowledge products are packaged values, that go hand in hand with the importance of of company culture and values. One important value is trust, which is the true infrastructure for a international knowledge business. Based upon this trust, professional knowledge-sharing and -creation is key to innovative strength and profitability.
4. Professional means focussed and targeted, structured and thereby value generating exchange of (replicable) knowledge. The leveraging of local knowledge is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage.
5. The key elements of professional global knowledge sharing are:
   • valuable content, that enables decision making
   • a structured global community of knowledgeable people with well defined knowledge targets
   • technical systems that allows people to bridge geographical and time distances (enterprise systems, corporate portals, middle-ware, artificial intelligence, access technology, mobile systems, palms)
   • a managerial system that encourages and supports the flow of knowledge and must be based upon suitable knowledge business models and processes.

1. Organizations increasingly have to master complex situations successfully. As complex adaptive systems these organizations will build on new sociological patterns and new processes and organizational structures.
2. Transactions will be managed in projects and innovations will be driven by communities (of practice) that cross organizational borders, functions, organizations and nations. Inside and outside the organization will become obsolete. One of many chapters: The e-lancers (Knowledge Workers)
3. The core of these future organizations or, to call them by a more apt name, networks, will be e-lancers, knowledge workers that can be seen as investors and harvesters of their own intellectual capital.
4. Projects will be staffed with these e-lancers, based on there qualifications, experiences and social skills. The staffing and the project set-up will be managed by international switchboards, organizations, that can be commercial corps., non-commercial organizations or independent institutions.
5. Free competition in between e-lancers for projects and in between projects for e-lancers will be the basic principle. The qualifications and skills of the e-lancers will be evaluated and documented by objective and independent institutions.
6. The e-lancers will be self-responsible to further develop their intellectual capital through learning along their working processes and qualification through (e-) learning / training, provided by independent institutions.
7. It will be their responsibility to further leverage their intellectual capital through new assessments / certification processes, provided by independent institutions.
8. Important is the focus on the people and their capabilities, as investors of human capital instead of employees = the used ones.
9. Every e-lancer will be a member of one or more communities of practice to exchange knowledge and to further develop ideas to solution from ideas to inventions to innovations.
10. These communities are areas of trust, lead by facilitators who are voted in by the community. Core community members provide "information carrier waves", content that builds the base for further contributions of non-core members.
11. To make e-working and knowledge transfer in Europe a reality, legal and organizational barriers against knowledge transfer and virtual-organization has to be managed. A virtual state (Europe-land) can be a switchboard for the e-lancers that allows appropriate evaluation, contracting and compensation. The knowledge transfer can be evaluated and compensated by an virtual European e-lancer currency (the e-uro).

1. Projects will be by set-up and managed through e-team-platforms. These portals are open enterprise systems, based on the internet principle.
2. The portals allow to manage projects with international, distributed team-structures by providing applications such as: tasks, roadmaps, issues, calendar, polling, chat, discussion forums, document management, intelligent search capability, application sharing, information bartering systems and multimedia-exchange...
3. These portals will be based on open standards. They will include middleware that provides increasingly sophisticated agents to cover the basic work-requirements (e.g. searches) and allows ontology-documentation and ontology-matching to discover new ideas/innovations.
4. Therefore open transaction hubs and standard API with possibilities of machine to machine communication are required in future networks.
5. The target is business to business and e-lancer to e-lancer integration beyond the browser.
6. The e-lancers will share their knowledge (experiences, key learnings, best practices) through collaboration platforms, portals that that function as sharenets.
7. These web-based knowledge portals provide for example, ways to capture and codify knowledge along processes. They provide a structure (knowledge domains) that sets the captured information into context, realizes fast search and browsing techniques and provides meaning to the content to support actions.
8. These web-based knowledge portals will also provide a community platform, that allows communities of practice to collaborate and innovate, e.g. with features like: news, discussions forums, what's new, user directories, knowledge development sites, e-mail alerts, chat, classified advertising, shared bookmarks, incentives, review processes, ad-hoc workflows and knowledge payment systems...
9. E-learning will be provided by applications that are interactive and based on micro-modules to support learning at the workplace, that is adaptive to the e-lancers needs, qualifications and reactions.
10. E-team portals, web-based knowledge portals and e-learning applications will be inter-linked and hosted by a free ISP's. The applications will be hosted in national data-centers with broadband "local-dial in" possibility. All data-centers will be connected over broadband-networks.
11. As the e-lancers are mobile-workers (tele-workers) mobility and mobile access will be of key importance.
12. The transfer of portal-functions, such as directories, resource management or e-learning applications to mobile devices will give Europe a competitive advantage on the way to agility. Technical standards such as GPRS and UMTS will make multimedia usage of mobile applications possible and ad value to WAP as transmission standard.

• Opportunities
  1. The knowledge society is a decentralized society. Decisions are made in the cores of networks. The people who know decide, therefore better decisions are made
  2. The knowledge society is self-regulating. More variables, freedom and information are available. This leads to responsible thinking and acting. The knowledge worker receives more power.
  3. The knowledge society is global / transnational, knowledge crosses boundaries soundlessly. This brings out wealthfare and connects nations.
  4. The knowledge society offers economies of scale not known today. The creation of knowledge and the invest into re-usability creates the possibility for unlimited re-use.
  5. The knowledge society is an open society. Creative input and new ideas are welcome and never censored - as there are no censors. This constitutes a driving force for innovation.
  6. The knowledge society creates additional degrees of freedom: Where, when and if work is performed is dependant on the knowledge workers themselves.
• Risks
  1. Recentralizing: Incorrect decisions are made in the cores of the knowledge web, due to internal weakness. The carriers of know-how no longer decide: Poor decisions are made, resulting in ill defined power structures
  2. Over- and understeering, missing steps for complexity reduction: Degrees of freedom will enable conscious or unconscious abuse or irresponsible actions.
  3. Culture globalization and culture equalization: cultural differences and behavioral differences as a source of innovation and life quality become weakened. Even worse: unidirectional osmosis by a lead country culture.
  4. Economies of scale create unemployment. Knowledge products are replicable by copy & paste or worse: automated copy & paste.
  5. Censorship: The electronic filter deletes privacy in electronic communication. The employee becomes transparent.
  6. Overload: Information overload leads to degree of information paralysis, no decisions are taken because constantly changing information hinders making a decision at all.
• Action items
  1. Identification, evaluation, and development of responsible, knowledgeable decision-makers in corporations, government and educational systems: A joint definition of new working profiles is necessary.
  2. Replacement of obsolete steering mechanisms, by complexity-reducing orientation. Steering through chartas, stories and rules of conduct.
  3. Establishing of a meta-culture (network yourself, copy from your neighbor, think and speak out as an international entrepreneur) while local characteristics and diversity remain.
  4. Creation of employment with a local, individual adoption of knowledge products and prevention of complete automation of knowledge web cores.
  5. Replacement of censorship by the market: knowledge capital markets (like patent offices) and new knowledge money markets (idea marketplaces) for identification and governing of valuable knowledge.
  6. Generating new "work rules" for creating and using IT / virtuality for bridging the difference of time and space - but not replacing human intuition, interfacing and skills.

Autobiographic of Joachim Döring (born 1970 in Bad Hersfeld)

• Studies in engineering with business administration at Technical University of Berlin.
• Studies in International Business at Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, USA. Trainee at Siemens,
• Public Communication Networks Group, Munich.
• Different line- and consulting-functions within Siemens Semiconductor / Fiber Optics Group in Germany and USA. Project Manager
• Business Process Reengineering at Siemens Components, Malaysia. Project Manager Global Supply-Chain Management at Siemens Microelectronics, USA, Japan and Europe.

Joachim Döring managed the marketing activities within the global student network and is co-founder of the Center for Change- and Knowledge Management at the Technical University of Berlin. Joachim lectures Business Transformation at the chair for Allgemeine und Industrielle Betriebswirtschaftlehre, Prof. Dr. Reichwald, TU München. He is invited speaker at international congresses and at the Universitätsseminar der Wirtschaft (USW) Schloß Gracht.