That's fine for the corporation but not so fine for the over-extended knowledge worker, who is punished by the failure of gains in business productivity to translate into improvements in the quality of his or her own life and standard of living. Laptops, cellular phones, wireless modems, and fax machines may change the work environment for many professionals, but they don't alter the thought processes that ultimately lead to breakthroughs. It's getting more out of people. Process excellence is really saying that, as a strategy, how you do something is maybe more important than the product itself. The university's legal counsel says he expects WGU to complete incorporation early this year, and plans to seek approval from all three of the regional accrediting bodies with jurisdiction in the participating states.
Officials hope to begin offering classes next fall.
Partly because of corporate downsizing and cost-cutting moves that have thinned the ranks of middle managers, new employees no longer get the benefit of a long apprentice period under senior mentors but must start contributing to the organization right away. Futurist Joseph Pelton of the International Space University in France sees a global trend leading to the replacement of traditional universities with cyberuniversities and warns that if existing universities do not reform quickly they will rapidly decline into irrelevance. IT IS Researchers at Princeton University have released a paper documenting ways that nefarious crackers could dupe unwitting Web browsers into divulging personal information, such as bank personal identification numbers or credit card numbers. His system, which now includes more than 100 computers from different manufacturers, appears to its users as a single machine that hides the peculiarities of the particular operating systems of the component systems. At the beginning of the decade, some 20 million Americans were subject to electronic scrutiny via their computer files and logs, and if the tendency continues, almost 40 million workers will be operating under the watchful eye of Big Brother, predicts Carl Botan, a communications professor at Purdue University.