21st Century Communication Trends

In the last two decades, the world has advanced tremendously. Due to globalization, the entire world is becoming a “global village”. The 21st century, is an age of techno savvy communication technologies, diversity, and networking. The world is becoming smaller and smaller.

Stephen P. Borgatti identifies five key organizational trends.

Globalization: This is due to reduced cost and improved quality of international transportation and communication; search for unsaturated markets; and exploit regional cost and expertise differences. All this has led to increasingly global sales, manufacturing, research, management, movement from direct exports to having sales offices in different countries to having manufacturing to all functions spread across the globe, and increasingly global labor market. For example, Wal Mart’s global expansion; Sam Walton opened the first Wal Mart store in Arkansas. It then started expanding internationally in 1991 by opening its stores in Mexico first, gradually to Germany and other countries. It’s now coming to India, and has a tie up with Bharti. Their market saturation in USA, led them to globalize. Another example could be of Wipro. It has 26% of sales growth from its global sales.

Diversity: This is due to changing demographics, and globalization of the labor market; leading to workforce getting more heterogeneous sexually, racially, culturally, and individually, etc.; source of both innovation and conflict/communication problems; and a need to cope with different styles of interaction, dress, presentation, physical appearance. For example Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson are leading companies in diverse culture.

Flexibility: This is due to differentiated customer needs -- filling them exactly is source of competitive advantage, increasing diversity in workplace, and increased pace of change in technology and markets. All this has led to organizational systems and processes and people that can respond differently to different situations, fewer detailed rules and procedures, greater autonomy, encouragement for initiative, customizable employment relationships: telecommuting, job sharing, mommy tracks, pay for skills, and lifetime employability, not lifetime employment. Following are the examples; Toyota (systems and processes), Yahoo (fewer rules and procedures), Google (greater autonomy for initiative and encouragement), IBM (customizable employment relations), General Electric (lifetime employability, not lifetime employment).

Flat: This trend is due to need for speed, which makes it helpful to empower employees to make decisions, which means fewer managers are needed; changes in information technology mean less need for the communication and control functions of middle managers; and globalization means intensified competition, which increases the need to cut costs. This has led to fewer levels of management, workers empowerment, and fewer differences in responsibility (not in pay) across levels. For example, Trident group which is a textile company; Intel; Nokia etc.

Networked: This trend is due to new information technologies, especially groupware, client-server, distributed computing, fast changing customer needs and competitor offerings, and more complicated products require better integration of manufacturing, design, and marketing functions; leading to direct communication across unit & firm boundaries, ignoring chain of command, cross-unit team structures, outsourcing & downsizing, strategic alliances with competitors and others, firms that are your competitors, customers and collaborators all at the same time, close coordination among firms (e.g., JIT systems) and information sharing (open computer systems), and across the board contact with customers, not just official boundary spanners, customization & decentralization. For example DELL, for its networking strategies; GM, for its cross unit team structures; FORD, for its downsizing and outsourcing; Wal-Mart, for its close coordination; IBM & WIPRO, for their strategic alliances; and finally Google, Amazon, eBay, for their decentralization.

The following articles tell us about the tremendous growth of technology and globalization. It tells us the importance of the above mentioned five trends and how they are helping in shaping the global economy.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2000/Summer/art04.pdf

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_n11_v12/ai_17781969