Corporate Identity and Vision: Challenges for the New Millennium

As we approach the millennium, organizations are beginning to work smarter as well as faster. They are using the communications and knowledge technology such as groupware and the web to better effect (Hoffman & Novak, 1995, US Dept of Commerce, 1998). Knowledge networks between companies, customers and suppliers are not only extensive but also intensive in nature. That is not only because of the ubiquity of the Internet and of intranet use but because the process of doing business and organizing work is changing. The hitherto pre-existing boundaries within and between organization and environment will become more permeable as the networks expand with the greater interactivity of the evolving networks. Hoffman and Novak (ibid) suggest that the web’s interactivity is the avenue to greater relationship marketing with customers as well as cost benefits. Equally, the internal layers of organizations have been stripped down throughout the last 15-20 years of downsizing and delayering (Rajan & Van Eupen, 1997). In both the latter descriptions, internal-internal and in the internal-external systems, those engaged in business seek greater collaboration (Horwitch, 1995). Kauffman (1995), relating this to evolutionary theory, describes it as technological co-evolution: one business creating niches for another in the ecological landscape of the new technology market or “technosphere”. Although referring to technological co-evolution, it seems reasonable to infer organizational co-evolution too as a concomitant structural development. Saffo (1995) suggests just such an organizational co-evolution in the “value webs” conceptualization he introduces.The newly emerging organizational forms discussed by Saffo include a diverse range from networked SMEs or cooperatives, like ‘Ocean Spray’ who use a single company name, to giant multinationals like general Motors with EDI links to suppliers. As Saffo notes, boundaries and identities are getting more permeable. It is difficult to determine where one such “entity” ends and another begins since their fates are so closely intertwined. There is increasing evidence of this across all sectors of the economy in advanced countries and with globalization this will increase. The new mindsets required by employees in the changing organizations is that of the self-employed i.e. accepting responsibility for their own marketability, seeing employers as customers and rewards as dependent on individual contribution. There are a number of implications for organizational identity and knowledge management in these changes.