Cellular Green-Teams in global network organisations

Information technology (IT) and communications technologies are promoting new virtual forms of business enterprises based on teleworking. Performance issues relating to organisation form, depend much on the performance and interworking of technology, infrastructure, and working practice. The cellular Green-Team approach as practiced at a heavy engineering Small-to-Medium sized Enterprise (SME) involves daily meetings and noticeboards to plan, monitor and control collaborative working across virtual autonomous business units in both office and shop floor environments. Current research involves development of an IT-based version of this system, with emphasis on capture of the qualitative aspects of corporate knowledge in parallel with existing Computer-Aided-Design (CAD)/Computer-Aided-Manufacture (CAM)/Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)/Finance quantitative systems. In future is planned the implementation of the system in a global network of Green-Teams collaborating on engineering design tasks. This paper describes how such an intranet (i.e. corporate use of Internet technologies) impacts on organisational delivery of information, operations, structure, strategy, management style, and employees. Supporting the wider applicability of these findings, are the summarised results of a 28 company-survey undertaken by the authors.