Introduction
Organizations operating in the 21st century face multiple challenges since they have to remain at par with technology for them to remain competitive.
For technology-intensive organizations such as those operating in the electronic hardware and software industries, the challenges are even amplified since they have to pay incredible attention to innovation and creativity in the effort to ensure that they are not rendered obsolete when new technologies emerge.
However, this does not imply that the approaches of other organizations’ evolution of management are not influenced by technology. The emergence of social media and other internet-based marketing platforms has affected the way product and service sector organizations place their products and services in the global markets.
Through recognition of the roles of technology in influencing the manner in which organizations in the 21st century approach their managerial practices, this paper investigates the common principles and practices used to manage the 21st-century technology-intensive organizations with reference to four main principles.
These principles and practices are strategic management, human capital management, innovation and creativity, and managerial approaches such as democratic management approach and bureaucratic management plans.
Human capital management
Technology-intensive organizations are now investing heavily in human capital development as one of the best practices in management.
This approach is opposed to the traditional approach of focusing on investment in equipments together with physical capital. Increased investment in human capital seeks to ensure that organizations develop skills and knowledge bases of their employees to guarantee their capability of meeting the emerging needs.
Focus on the training of employees is important in technology-intensive organizations since technology keeps on changing (Revels & Morris, 2012, p.62). The shift from the traditional focus of investing in physical assets is driven by the changing trends of requirements to enhance organizational competitiveness.
In the 21st century technology-intensive organizations, remaining competitive requires the creation of new ideas of developing the existing technologies deployed by an organization to cut costs. This means that organizations are forced to employ people who are highly skilled to ensure that such skills are developed continuously (Ruppe, 2006, p.39).
Consequently, technology-intensive organizations do not depend on their current technological state to achieve future success. Rather, they depend on the brainpower of their employees to achieve success in the long term akin to the fact that current technologies are more likely to be obsolete once their life span expires.
Focusing on the management of human capital by seeking ways of developing them implies that the human capital available within an organization will have created other technologies that are consistent with the current market trends and technological retirements to remain competitive when technologies get obsolete.
In the 21st century, managers in the technology-intensive organizations focus on management planning for human capital. This permits organizations to put in place mechanisms for ensuring that strategic objectives of an organization are achieved consistent with technological requirements.
Revels and Morris (2012) support this assertion by further arguing that human capital management in a technology-based organization is beneficial since it fosters effectiveness besides enhancing the current and future efficiency (p.65).
This benefit is perhaps one of the most essential paybacks of human capital management for organizations, which want to accomplish the same set of tasks through a few employees in an environment mediated by technology.
Human capital management also provides viable and accurate projections for staffing needs in technology-intensive organizations together with projection of the necessary budgetary requirements to meet organizational operation needs.
While traditional approaches to organizational management viewed employees as any other asset such as land and financial resources, human resource management approaches deployed in the 21st century technology-intensive organizations focus on retention of employees.
Organizations employ training and development efforts to ensure they have effective, creative, and innovative workforce that is highly knowledgeable on technological dynamics. Future changes in technology are costly to an organization in terms of maintaining its competitive advantage (Revels & Morris, 2012, p.63).
Losing talented and highly knowledgeable employees to competitors amounts to making rival organizations better in terms of responding to technological changes relative to the organization that invested in training and developing them.
Upon inferring from the above argument, human capital management in the 21st century technology-intensive organizations focuses on improving conditions and welfare of employees with the objective of making them productive in their work for optimal outputs in terms of helping an organization to remain competitive in the technology industry.
This goal is achieved through incorporation of HR in the development of human capital management strategies. HR can have a significant role during strategy formulation through the provision of human resource capital that has requisite skills and knowledge to enhance technological development of an organization through creativity and innovation (Brockbank, 2007, p.338).
In this regard, it is crucial to note that human capital management in the 21st century technology-intensive organizations does not only focus on rewards, job allocation, and remuneration as opposed to traditional approaches to human capital management in the technology-intensive organizations. It also includes programs for adding value to human capital through training and development to enhance creativity and innovation.
Strategic Management
Strategic management is an essential approach deployed by 21st century technology-intensive organizations to enhance performance. It involves a group of continuous activities and comprehensive processes that organizations use to organize and align resources systematically to achieve their objectives, goals, and aims.
Dess, Lumpkin, and Taylor support this line of argument by further positing that actions in strategic management are aligned with the organization’s mission, visions, and plans (2005, p.71). For technology-intensive organizations, the mission is to remain relevant in the marketplace.
The organizations deploy strategic management as a tool for gaining competitive advantage. Several strategies are used in gaining competitive advantage, among them being pursuing the low-cost strategy (Dess, Lumpkin & Taylor, 2005, p.79).
Creation of innovative products together with strategies for improvement of the production process are some of the important ways in which cost reduction strategies are enhanced in the effort to increase the profitability of organizations.
These approaches are opposed to the traditional management approaches in which the concern for productivity and profitability improvement was based on increasing production levels and efforts to produce products and services through the produce-to-sell strategy.
Technology-intensive organizations operating in the 21st century use strategic management to direct managers to conduct analysis of the external and internal operational environment to determine the likelihood of success of the respective organizations. Through strategic management, competitive advantage of the organizations is realized through a number of ways.
In this context, Dess, Lumpkin, and Taylor reveal that operational effectiveness is not adequate to enhance competitive advantage, which is sustainable in the long term (2005, p.56). Rather, the scholars hold that innovation in management that was realized over the last two decades acts as a crucial tool for enhancing competitive advantage that is sustainable for organizations operating in any industry.
These include benchmarking, deployment of strategies for effective production such as the just-in-time production philosophy, reengineering, and outsourcing, among others.
In particular, technology-dependent organizations of the 21st century managerial approaches are overly interested in learning from past mistakes and/or from the analysis of success of other organizations operating in the organizations’ industry in the effort to create strategies of success that supersede rival organizations.
Innovation and Creativity
Modern technology-intensive organizations seek to gain competitive advantage in the industry by focusing on enhancing organizational creativity and innovation through people.
At an individual level, innovation and creativity may emanate from the existence of conducive social environment that may make people innovative and creative (Crook et al., 2011, p.443) and/or creativity development in people’s life span (Meisinger, 2007, p.12).
At an organizational level, innovation and creativity can emanate from the interaction of various components. According to Blanton, these factors include knowledge, creative thinking, and motivation (2009, p.57).
Knowledge refers to the understanding that people bring on the table of creativity and innovation within an organization. Creative thinking refers to the manner in which people approach various problems. It depends on the working style and personality together with the way people think (Blanton, 2009, p.59).
For creativity and innovation to thrive at an organizational level, it is crucial for innovative and creative culture to be created within an organization. For modern technology-intensive organizations, management has the obligation to create this culture through enhancing information sharing and involvement of employees in the decision-making process together with the derivation of new strategies for organizational success.
This strategy is opposed traditional management approaches in which people were only employed within an organization to follow specific procedures of work without their involvement in the derivation of the procedures.
Some theorists attribute creativity to experimentation. For instance, Drunker (1999) argues that experimentation gives rise to creativity (p.76). For people to engage in experimentation, freedom of utilization of organizational resources must be guaranteed.
This position opposes the traditional approach to organizational management of technology-intensive organizations since the place of employees in enhancing innovation and creativity was not recognized. Indeed, only specialists for different organizational departments were allowed to make suggestions on how organizations would technologically evolve.
In this effort, the 21st century technology-intensive organizations permit their employees to use organizational resources in the experimentation of the probable innovative ideas that can enhance organizations’ technological development.
The challenge of developing managerial approaches that enhance creativity and innovation in a technological-intensive organization is rested on the platforms of managing people so that they become knowledgeable workers. The challenge with traditional management approaches was how to develop people to become effective and efficient clerical and/or manual workers.
The change in focus implies that human capital has changed from being dominated by people who comply with instructions to people who reject commands, directions, and control based on reason and interpretation of the effectiveness of the directions, controls, and commands to their quality of work outputs (Crook et al., 2011, p.445).
This means that the new managerial approaches in technologically intensive organizations view employees as organizational resources that are not easy to command or monitor to attain a bureaucratically managed organizational goal and objective.
Several managerial approaches to innovation and creativity are evident in the 21st century technology-intensive organizations that are different from traditional approaches. The first approach is to exploit the knowledge of employees to enhance creativity and innovation or the development for such knowledge through training and empowerment programs (Volberda, 2006, p.361).
Knowledge bases are also organized into different schools. Persons having skills and appropriate knowledge are recruited to fill the schools to foster knowledge and information sharing (Meisinger, 2007, p.12). The goal is to establish organizational knowledge architectures capable of enhancing the competitive advantage of an organization through the development of new technologies to meet the emerging technological trends.
The traditional management plans would approach this challenge by hiring or contracting persons who can bring new technological development in the organizations instead of using the organizations’ people as the source of organizational innovation and creativity.
Democratic versus Bureaucratic Management Approaches
Traditional approaches of management of organizations emphasized bureaucratic management systems. The goal of management was to enhance strict compliance to fixed methodologies of doing work.
Such inflexibility is criticized by the 21st century approaches to the management of technology-intensive organizations as hindering the creation of room for recognition of people as the most important sources of organizations’ competitiveness and success (Crook et al., 2011, p.444).
Use of bureaucratic management traditional approaches was pegged on the assertion that bureaucracy aids in efficient and effective attainment of organizational preset goals.
Through the management approaches, effectiveness was enhanced through allocation of powers to positions as opposed to persons (Che Omar & Mohammad, 2012, p.2534). This made the traditional approaches of management of technology-intensive organizations bureaucratic structures that possess high levels of impersonality.
Bureaucracy emphasizes organizational formal structures together with standard management approaches to employees. Since several organizations operate in the technology industry, competition is inevitable (Revels & Morris, 2012, p.65). Thus, new strategies and policies for enhancing success are developed.
This effort made the managers of the organization consider bureaucracy important for implementation of policies. In the 21st century, democratic approaches are used as the best management approaches.
Through this approach, remuneration is not based on hierarchical positions in the organizational management. Rather, people are remunerated depending on their contribution to enhancing the success of an organization through the creation of new service and product lines capable of out powering competitors.
Management of information-based organizations requires the creation of positive work environments to foster creativity and innovation. Based on this argument, the 21st century technology-intensive organizations deploy democratic managerial approaches. The aim is to ensure that junior employees are provided with adequate responsibility. Such employees must deploy enthusiasm besides challenging their own work.
Under the democratic management approach, collaboration, consultation, and feedback are encouraged as some of the mechanisms for enhancing effectiveness in organizational operations (Volberda, 2006, p.361).
Operating in the technology industry requires the inculcation of strategies that reduce any grave mistakes that may threaten the operation of an organization. In the event of occurrence of such mistakes, a competitor utilizes the opportunity to claim the market share of an organization.
This may translate into sinking an organization into total failure, thus leading to its placement under receivership. In the realization of this danger, the 21st century technology-intensive organizations utilize all resources available to it, including talents and knowledge bases of its human resources. Such effort underlines the significance of democratic management approaches in such organizations.
Traditional approaches in management in organizations whose operations depended intensively on technology were predominantly autocratic. Under such managerial approaches, people employed in the organizations could not inform their superiors when things took wrong directions. This hindered the free flow of information and ideas from the bottom to the top (Kirkpatrick, 2009, p.55).
In the 21st century, organizations emphasize free flow of information from employees to the respective managers. Employees are given the opportunity to involve their ideas in the process of organizational development, together with giving them credit for their ideas.
The strategy facilitates the modern technology-dependent organizations to reduce organizational politics, which created tensions between employees and managers under the traditional autocratic approaches of organizational management.
This strategy for employee empowerment is critical in enhancing retention of employees. Indeed, 21st century technology-intensive organizations spend huge financial resources in training and development of their employees. Hence, considering the techniques of their retention is one of the essential best principles and practices of management.
Conclusion
Technology-intensive organizations face the challenge of remaining relevant in their industry amid the rapidly changing technology, which can make them obsolete.
The paper argued that such an effort requires a change of traditional management approaches to concentrate on management strategies that foster creativity and innovation, enhance growth of democratic managerial approaches, and/or focus on effective and efficient management of human capital.
For short and long-term success, technology-intensive organizations operating in the 21st century also deploy strategic management as an additional common principle or practice to manage the 21st century technology-intensive organizations.
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