Towards Web of Excellence ( WoE)
Organizing resources towards realising objectives has been a constant challenge in human endeavours. In pre-industrial age days work was manual and organized around individual members of a family such as farmers or carpenters. With the introduction of machines, work was organized in factory and around production. Division of labour, departmentalization and specialisation were dominant themes around which all organization principles were built upon. Centre of excellence- represented a practically perfect form of organization is to "bring in" the identified best resources-material, machinery and men under one roof and put them into productive work. All organizations followed a similar line of action: determine the purpose, identify relevant resources, bring them "inside" the enterprise and put them into production. In a predominantly material based industry and supported by manual work it did work well and produced wonderful results.
Now we live in information age and a connected world. Excellent information - idea, design, creativity remain outside the enterprise. One can not always bring them "in" let alone identify them. Information is essentially an outside resource. Any information that is brought in into the inside of an enterprise may be stale by the time it comes in. One can not build excellence based on "stale" information. The alternative, or in fact the imperative is to "outlink" to sources of excellent information and having access to right information always instead of picking information that is "right" at the time of capture. So this imperative of being "connected to right information source always" than to " collect" information from there and store it for future use leads to a conclusion that organizing principle for future organization is not "centre of excellence" but "web of excellence". Web of excellence does not bring "in" best instead "outlink" to the best. This demands a paradigm shift in organizational approach from "excellence in storage " to "excellence in search"