The technological environment might be the most important environmental factor for organizational development going forwards. In particular, advances in communication have increased the pace at which business operates today. In addition, the increase in communication speed and intensity has resulted in the evolution of the knowledge economy. When a company's success depends almost wholly on its knowledge base, organizational development becomes critical to the company's success.

This is because organizational development places specific emphasis on the human resources and organizational culture functions. Talent must be attracted, retained and shepherded in order to achieve long-term success in an information economy. Companies that do not have plans in place to help them foster strong organizational development will struggle to meet the requirements of the information economy as they will lose key people, fail to attract talent, or will have cultures that are incongruent with the dynamism...

Whereas firms in the past could build best practices domestically, this is much more difficult to achieve in a global marketplace where best practices are constantly developed and refined, and may be geared towards certain cultural elements. Only through a process of constant organizational development can a company keep pace with the changes in the global environment. Firms that do not recognize the importance of organizational development because they operate in mature markets may find that foreign competition wins their market share, and they are unable to adapt to the challenges.
Works Cited;

Kritsonis, a. (2005). Comparison of change theories. International Journal of Scholarly Academic Intellectual Diversity. Vol. 8 (1) 1-7/

ODPortal.com website. (2010). Retrieved May 5, 2010 from http://www.odportal.com/