Finding the Network Way

24Hour Knowledge Factory

Building a 24-hour knowledge factory does have merit in that there are business processes that could be split into 8 hour increments and be passed onto the next global teammate. In fact, the 24 hour knowledge factory is already being worked into some professions. For example, an article recently published was discussing hospitals sending out x-rays over seas so that a radiologist who is wide awake could exam them instead of someone who half asleep working on the nightshift. The major factor that I feel 24 hour knowledge factories will fail is in the communication between the passing of hands. Even with new technologies of documenting what was done by the team before hand, the explaination may not directly translate or be understood the same to someone else. This is an issue of someone that could be sitting right next to you, so imagine someone across the world from you and their work ends up getting held up because they need to wait for a response from you, which in turn makes your work held up. In a sense this is like the grade school lesson where each student stands in a line and passes on the same msg to the next person by a whisper, by the time the msg gets to the last person in the chain, the msg ends up meaning something entirely different. True, technology would have these communication lines documented and communication lines could be built but its one thing building a process and having everyone from around the world following it. Back to the radiologist example, the document that I read gave an example of how a smaller offshore company made the best bid to exam the x-rays had only 2 certified professions that were signing off on all the work of the 20 other employees who were untrained.. Thats a scary thought that your work is dependent on whom ever each night and its hard for your business to be able to go out there each night and track what is going on in the other country efforts-which directly goes into my next topic,security.
The security risks that passing this work between working teams of different countries is more then the document leads one to believe. We have our own internal trade secret traders, so how much would the problem get when we open up to offshore companies.
On a good note though, communication and security are just barriers that can be overcome with time, effort, and patients. Its a very interesting topic, that it seems the medical professionals will be the front runners on seeing how well it will work.

Here is an article regarding radiologists:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12392-2005Apr23.html

posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 9:46 PM