The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory: Work and Organizational Redesign and Associated Challenges

The term “24-Hour Knowledge Factory” connotes a geographically dispersed team of workers in which members of the team work on endeavors on a continous basis. This work has five defining features: (i) the same body of work is processed sequentially and handed one unit to another; (ii) the handover of work is characterized by short cycle times and the frequency of handover is greater than in traditional offshore work; (iii) the functional units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory operate in a peer-to-peer relationship where each functional unit audits the work of other units; (iv) the knowledge transfer between the different work units and work history between units is effected through specialized mechanisms and a distributed human agency called the composite personae; and (v) the constituent units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory feature similar work capabilities, as opposed to the more traditional model of global teams where the distributed teams usually possess complementary work capabilities. The distributed units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory work on the same body of work and do very similar work; therefore, the units have nearly identical capabilities. The authors identify two sets of research issues surrounding this phenomenon that fall within the technical paradigm and the organizational paradigm of information systems.