What are the four ongoing challenges that characterize the current business landscape? What is the potential impact of these challenges on business?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Globalization's impacts on business include the fact that corporations operate worldwide, transcending national borders. Companies that want to grow often need to tap international markets. The effects of technological change include the changes brought about by The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, mobile applications, Big Data analytics, and cloud computing. Technology both complicates things and creates new opportunities. The challenges come from the rapid rate at which communication, transportation, information, and other technologies change. For example, after just a couple of decades of widespread desktop use, customers switched to laptop models, which require different accessories. Knowledge management is the set of practices aimed at discovering and harnessing an organization's intellectual resources—fully using the intellects of the organization's people. Because companies in advanced economies have become so efficient at producing physical goods, most workers have been freed up to provide services or "abstract goods" such as software, entertainment, data, and advertising. These workers, whose primary contributions are ideas and problem-solving expertise, are often referred to as knowledge workers. Collaboration across boundaries ensures that people in different parts of the organization collaborate effectively with one another. This requires productive communications among different departments, divisions, or other subunits of the organization. For example, "T-shaped" managers break out of the traditional corporate hierarchy to share knowledge freely across the organization (the horizontal part of the T) while remaining committed to the bottom-line performance of their individual business units (the vertical part).