What Is Going on?
In 2005, Thomas L. Friedman[173] famously described the “flattening effect” globalization has on people around the world. In such a flat world, we expect digitalization to dissolve antiquated organizational structures and flatten also knowledge asymmetries in a way that will allow many operational tasks to be carried out by lower skilled people, and increasingly even by machines.
We see a widening gap between “knowledge workers”, skilled with scarce expertise, and “regular workers”, who once started on a lower transactional level, but progressively take over superior jobs and now being best described as “application workers”. The gap between the two groups of workers is bridged by IT—Information Technology. With the help of IT, we are able to transform information and data into components of knowledge that an application worker can be trained to apply or that can even be used to run autonomous processes. The fundamental change is, a shift from a traditional knowledge transfer, to a new form of collaboration, where knowledge worker, application worker and machines, are requested to find the optimal way of working together—and ideally continuously improve the optimal mix of collaboration, under the heading “machine learning”.3