Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
be identified. Sub-organizations may be disjoint,
for example two departments in the same division,
or they may have a relation of strict inclusion, for
example, a department may be a part of a division;
it is also possible that sub-organizations intersect
without neither being included in another, for ex-
ample, a project group with people from several
departments. The existence of these possibilities
reflects two practices arising from conflicting
needs.
The first practice consists in establishing a
hierarchical structure of the organization in order
to limit inefficacious or useless interactions among
people and to define clearly the decisional struc-
ture of the organization, determining who holds
the power to take decisions and to what extent.
A strict hierarchical structure for decision results
provided the following conditions be satisfied:
ible, by lifting restrictions that a strict hierarchical
structure imposes on people's coordination and
collaboration.
Along this set-theoretical reasoning, usually a
person belongs to more than one subset of people
or sub-organization. Say that she belongs to sub-
organization
X
. Then she also belongs to any
sub-organization
Y
whose set of people includes
the set of people of
X
, in particular she belongs
to the universe of people of the organization. Fur-
thermore, she can belong to other sets for which
the relation of
X
being included in does not hold.
A CODSS must allow mapping the configura-
tion of sub-organizations inside the organization,
the association of people to them and must support
the conversational decision processes associated
to the sub-organizations (and the whole organi-
zation).
The abstract conceptual device through which
sub-organizations (and the whole organization) are
mapped onto a CODSS will be called
organiza-
tional domain
. One takes an organizational domain
as a well-defined set of people within an organi-
zation for which at least one formalized decision
process exists. A sub-organization (or the whole
organization) is represented inside a CODSS as an
organizational domain. An organizational domain
includes support for the conversational decision
processes whose outputs (decisions) are imple-
mented through actions of people in the domain.
Suppose a department's head decides to request
an increase of budget to the division's head. He
has not the power to decide upon the request but
has the power to allocate department's resources
to prepare the request. Therefore, from the per-
spective of a CODSS structure an organizational
domain is defined by decision processes closed
with respect to the domain.
Let us assume that an organizational domain
Y
is represented inside a CODSS. The conversa-
tional decision processes occurring among people
in
Y
will be mapped on the CODSS structure as:
1. For any sub-organization
X
included in a
sub-organization
Y
, the decision power of
X
is head (or heads) is limited to
X
's members
and subordinated (even if indirectly) to
Y
's
head (or heads) decision power;
2. For any pair of sub-organizations
X
1
and
X
2
only one of three possibilities arises:
X
1
and
X
2
are disjoint;
X
1
includes
X
2
;
X
2
includes
X
1
.
A strictly hierarchical structure can have prob-
lems to adapt efficiently and even to accomplish
its mission. To counteract this, a second practice
of forming sub-organizations with people be-
longing to several sub-organizations of the strict
hierarchical structure can be worked out. This
negates condition (ii) above. Let us say that a
sub-organization (a project group)
X
3
is formed
with people from sub-organizations (departments)
X
1
and
X
2
. It follows that
X
3
intersects both
X
1
and
X
2
without being included in either. Albeit this
practice can result in some tension, it can also
make the organization more efficacious and flex-
Search WWH ::
Custom Search