No one person is in charge, no company, no consortium really dictates what appears on the Web. It appears to have a life of its own. It constantly probes the edge of chaos, risking complete anarchy, but, as a result of billions of individual decisions by all of us agents, the Web keeps on adapting to the present, changing in a way that mimics a conscious lifeform growing from cell to tissue to organ to body. In turn, managers are going to need to reconsider the way they assign staff to projects, and monitor work. Similarly, you may have to measure productivity by the number of emails responded to, number of postings to the bulletin board, number of updates, rather than on-time delivery of a particular manual.
Time frames shrink from months to weeks.
No, just as we have moved away from paper documentation as our primary mode of delivery, we will move away from a document-centered view to one that sees individual objects as our work focus, and the Web as an extended conversation in which we actively participate. The Science of Self-Organized Criticality . The Search for Order in a Chaotic World . Volume XIX in the Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Life at the Edge of Chaos .