ABSTRACT
Overview Competitive pressures on organizations have increased over the past several decades due to the convergence of several major trends. ese include geopolitical changes in Eastern Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, improvements in technology such as the Internet, and changes in workflow structure and management. ese convergent trends have been discussed by several authors, including omas L. Friedman in his book The World Is Flat. According to Friedman, in the last several decades, several accelerating trends have changed the way in which we view the workflow management associated with the production of products and services. ese trends included expansion of the World Wide Web, making information readily available, improvements in workflow and software management, the standardization of technology, international collaboration, outsourcing and insourcing of work, changes in the geopolitical environment, and offshoring of work across the world. ese trends recently converged and contributed to the creation of production systems in which organizations may dominate not by virtual of their size, but rather on their organizational core competencies and other competitive strengths applied to niche or newly created markets.
