The new organizational knowledge and its systems foundations

The new organizational knowledge for the 21st Century enterprise is imagined by some to reside principally in networked teams of information-sharing human experts. The firm's human resources are judged in this environment to be its only sustainable competitive advantage. I speculate that, to the contrary, the new organizational knowledge will be increasingly more system-based as compared to person-based. It will, however change in composition. Relative to the past, it will be more core-technical as compared to administrative, more transaction-oriented as compared to production-oriented, and more global and industry-specific as compared to local and firm-specific. A case study is used to illustrate these points. I conclude that, where sustainable competitive advantage can be achieved, it is likely to be based on technical, production-oriented, firm-specific business logic, and on the collective competence of the firm's people and systems taken together. Several lessons for systems management follow from these conclusions.