24 Hour Knowledge Factory

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The term 24 Hour Knowledge Factory refers to global work paradigm in which a team of professionals can develop products or provide services continuously throughout the day. The idea is the work of Dr. Amar Gupta.

Contents 1 Outline 2 Realizable Benefits 3 Current Research 4 Necessary Competencies and Possible Hurdles 5 Relationship to Offshoring 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Outline

The 24 Hour Knowledge Factory is a labor mechanism that uses the passage of the day and the rotation of the earth to distribute labor activities to globally dispersed teams of professionals. Through the transmission of data from one time zone to the next, the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory allows for work applicable to a certain activity to be performed continuously throughout the day. A description of this model, as described on Dr. Gupta's Nexus of Entrepreneurship and Technology (NEXT) website at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, is as follows:

The term "The Sun never sets on the British Empire," was a famous perception promulgated by the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries that boasted its worldwide proliferation of land ownership. It was said that the land owned by Britain was so varied across the world that the sun was always visible from some part of it. While the British Empire has since receded, we can now coin an equivalent phrase: "The Sun never sets on the 24-hour Knowledge Factory!"

The concept of the 24-hour Knowledge Factory is inspired by the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Revolution, manufacturing was a cottage industry where a product was developed from ideation to creation by a single craftsman and attending apprentices. The Revolution saw a transformation in manufactured goods from individual objects of art to interchangeable commodities. This transformation was made possible by investing unprecedented capital into specialized tools and machinery. Manufacturers, in order to leverage their invested capital as well as meet growing demands for their products, moved from daylight work hours to the modern system of working shifts around the 24 hour clock.

Today, the advanced economies of the world are moving from the production of tangible goods to the development of intangible intellectual property (IP). The frontier of IP development is still relatively new and we find ourselves in much the same place as pre-Revolution manufacturing. Software, ASICs, marketing campaigns, and many other fields still, by and large, produce objects of art by the work of a relatively small number of masters and understudies. We think it natural to ask ourselves if the analogy can be carried further. Can the development of intellectual property become a continuous 24 hour knowledge factory?

Already, industry can be seen to be experimenting with this concept. In particular, contemporary software development is often a global effort with development teams distributed across North America, Europe, Russia, India, and Australia, to name a few common places. This strategy can provide for both an efficient process of design, as well as faster turnaround time and time-to-market. Firms can have access to high-talent designers who would otherwise be forced either to move to different countries or work at odd hours during the night. Many industries have the potential to be changed by this paradigm, as professional service teams that surpass both geographic and temporal barriers can be utilized. The manner in which companies build, test, sell, and support their products and services will be dramatically changed.

The 24 hour knowledge factory can therefore deliver many benefits. However, there remain significant challenges in communication, collaboration, project management, and administration in this novel business environment. Our goal is to generate new ideas, explore many alternatives, and conduct research and development of new processes and systems that will make a significant contribution to the realization of the 24 hour knowledge factory.^[1]

[edit] Realizable Benefits

The 24 Hour Knowledge Factory is said to have the following highlights:

• The ability to develop innovative team collaboration techniques.
• Applicability to almost any form of IP development (software, marketing, etc).
• Provides new models for distributed business and management.
• Diversification of Knowledge Resources.
• Value chain upward movement.
• Shorter time for resolution of tasks.
• Earlier reporting of issues.
• Unintended process improvements.
• Cultural understanding incorporated within software.^[2][3]

Currently, one full-scale private-sector firm, WDSGlobal, has implemented the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory in a business setting. WDSGlobal utilized a team distributed in the UK, US and Asia to develop software using the Extreme Programming Methodology. The project, reviewed by Dr. Gupta's team, was considered a success and led to the establishment of a research project that analyzes globally distributed work at IBM. An excerpt from the findings of the research below shows the positive aspects that resulted from the implementation of the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory:

The parallel nature of the data from the IBM case study – with positive findings on collaborative successes from each team – suggests that the common theme in the literature of geographic distribution being a barrier to overcome is not sufficient. Instead, geographic distribution should be seen as a potential asset that can be leveraged, along with time zone differences. A number of benefits from leveraging the geographic structure were cited in the interviews with the distributed team. Example include: an increase in documentation and history retention; the ability to share short term tasks which required immediate attention so that work could be performed around the clock; and a more structured definition of work tasks and distribution of work items. The methods of coding of archival data derived from e-mail, telephone, meeting and other interactions could also be used as a feedback tool that could be highly valuable for corporations seeking to quantify the impact of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory. The evidence from this case study emphasizes that the spatial and temporal distributions in a 24-Hour Knowledge Factory should be looked upon as a characteristic to leverage rather than a barrier to overcome.^[4]

These, however, are just examples from only two companies. Once the effects of the model are confirmed by more analyses of current and future research, these and many more benefits are thought to be derived from employment of this paradigm.

[edit] Current Research

As a pilot project, research is currently focusing on round-the-clock software development by extending current agile processes. The group's aim is to overcome the spatial and temporal boundaries typical to these development methods and compose new systems and processes that facilitate the 24 hour knowledge factory. The research is focused on developing a concept prototype for exploring our initial ideas about software, simulation, and ASIC development in the 24 hour knowledge factory.^[5] A list of multiple working papers is located at the end of this wiki.

[edit] Necessary Competencies and Possible Hurdles

Implementation of the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory in a work setting will require massive amounts of planning and coordination, in addition government cooperation and inter - and intra-company mitigation of the cultural exchange problems commonly seen in global business endeavors. In terms of intra-company usage of the model, the breakdown of service knowledge into its most basic (atomic) elements is necessary (see agile systems), as the data being transferred needs to be understandable by the next member with little or no explanation required. This reliance on data transfer brings up the first assumption upon which this paradigm is built: data transfer between members of a globally distributed team is a) available, b) secure, and c) fast. Without this, the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory cannot exist, and the creation and maintenance of these infrastructures is of the highest import.

In providing services and/or creating intellectual property in multiple different countries, the question of accountability and the assignment of value-added processes (i.e., transfer pricing) to work done throughout differing jurisdictions becomes extremely significant. Conceptually, this assignment could occur in a number of different ways, but in reality various treaties and agreements between companies and governments will have to be made in order to decide upon how this will be done. Intellectual property protection laws will most likely have to evolve in order to facilitate the ownership of intellectual property by multiple entities.

Additionally, the lack of informal communication between colleagues, which may lead to major knowledge discoveries in some cases, is an obstacle within this system that must be overcome.^[6]

[edit] Relationship to Offshoring

As businesses employ the expertise of workers in different countries, and make more use of global resources, the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory will become more applicable. The benefits to be derived from the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory are conversely dependent upon the use of workers disseminated throughout the world. Preexisting global workforces of multinational firms, as well as newly developed professional services firms in low cost labor countries can be utilized in implementing the 24 Hour Knowledge Factory paradigm. However the desire and need to use this paradigm will undoubtedly lead to the furthering of offshoring and the use of global knowledge, as these items are integral to the success of this model.

[edit] See also

• Dr. Amar Gupta

[edit] References

[edit] External links

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN):

• Outsourcing in Healthcare Industry: Information Technology, Intellectual Property, and Allied Aspects
• Offshoring: The Transition From Economic Drivers Toward Strategic Global Partnership and 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
• Research Commentary: Toward the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory - A Prognosis of Practice and a Call for Concerted Research
• The Use of Information Systems in Collocated and Distributed Teams: A Test of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
• Toward the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
• A Four-Faceted Knowledge-Based Approach for Surmounting Borders
• 24-Hour Knowledge Factory: Using Internet Technology to Leverage Spatial and Temporal Separations

Others:

• Knowledge-Based Approach To Facilitate Engineering Design (link may require access rights to AIAA)
• IBM Honors Eller College of Management Professor. Link to article describing praise given to Dr. Gupta by IBM Corporation.
• http://spineless.ece.arizona.edu/24HrKF University of Arizona Electrical and Computer Engineering 24 Hour Knowledge Factory Work Group Wiki.