writers, poured into the job market, as companies sought to outsource many of the support services and non-core competencies. According to a Fast Company magazine cover story in 1997, the U.S. alone had more than 25 million people making their living as what they termed «freeagents». And of the workers still tethered to the corporation, more and more of them are now working outside the walls through telecommuting and flexible hours. Naturally, work involves collaboration, so networked workgroups of all sizes began to appear. Virtual companies - freed from the expense of traditional physical assets - populated many of the services industries, such as advertising, public relations.

Team Accura says the evolution in workgroups - as with most significant changes in today's business environment - is rooted in the adoption of technology, and captured in a series of laws posited by three of the industry's leading pundits (tab. 2). First, according to Moore's Law, computing power doubles every 18 months. Second, predicts Gilder's Law, network capacity grows three times faster than computing power. And third, states Metcalfe's Law, a network's usefulness is exponential to the number of users. Given the power of computers, the breadth of network connections and the advantage of group dynamics, it's no wonder people have responded according to the universal Law of Nature - creating new applications, services and job descriptions that work to their own natural advantage. Digital connections are now commonplace. Networks - once the domain of specialists confined to wiring closets and data centers - have become accessible to anyone with a modem and a browser. And traditional networked applications were quickly eclipsed by the popularity of Internet software services like Hotmail, Yahoo and Amazon.com. Almost instantaneously, more networked information existed outside the firewall than within. Pervasive computing prevailed. Organizations: A Whole Lot Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts - the productivity engendered by this onslaught of knowledge workers is a double-edged sword for many organizations grappling with the irreversible change in work style and direction.

Conclusion. While the autonomy of the groups is - in many cases - what enables innovative and rapid decision-making, questions of corporate structure abound. How do organizations benefit from the productivity of knowledge group, while reducing disruptions? Specifically, how do they (fig. 2):

eliminate redundancies;

protect assets;

coordinate with the corporate direction;

provide access to larger enterprise applications;

track progress;

conform with corporate standards and guidelines;

manage training (see Olson E.E., Murdoch S., Espinos V. (2000), Facilitating Organization Change: Lessons from Complexity Science, Portland, p. 310-321).REFERENCES

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