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University, there is a movement toward the horizontal organization. L.A.
Bossidy, chairman of Allied Signal Inc., sees a significant increase in produc-
tivity as more organizations restructure themselves around this concept.
In this paradigm, the organization restructures its goals and objectives
around the essential processes that define the organization's existence and
sequential survival. The result is the flattening of the organizational struc-
ture into essential processes — eliminating the traditional hierarchy of bu-
reaucratic divisions, departments, or sections. This allows both profit and
nonprofit organizations to be more responsive to their clients or customers.
The traditional goals of profitability, market share, and shareholders' satis-
faction will not be identified as goals, but as natural outcomes resulting
from the emphasis on tying goals to an organization's essential processes.
Integrating recent trends in the business organization field with an effec-
tive IS methodology is a critical success factor for an organization. For a
profit-centered organization, this will often provide the means to achieve
competitive advantages in the market by: enhancing existing products and
services, developing new products and services, changing the existing in-
dustry and its characteristics, and creating new industries and markets.
For a nonprofit organization, the ability to stretch shrinking resources
to meet the demands of its constituents is critical to its success. As budget
dollars for local, state, and federal agencies are cut, these agencies still
find themselves responsible for meeting the requirements of their char-
ters. They will also need to integrate their IS structures around proven
trends within the organization field to achieve their maximum productivi-
ty. Therefore, it is important to develop IS methodologies that integrate
these recent trends.
THE HORIZONTAL CORPORATION
The horizontal corporation is an approach for all types of organiza-
tions — public or private, profit or nonprofit, corporate or sole proprietor-
ships, large or small. The prerequisites for this approach are to redefine
corporate goals around strategic actions that will improve the organiza-
tion's competitiveness, efficiency, or other strategic actions defined by
the organization. One important goal for any organization is to focus on
improvement.
To meet the challenges of competitive domestic and international mar-
kets or the demands for shrinking funding dollars, organizations must con-
stantly review and improve their operations. The organization must know
its markets and customers thoroughly to know what it will take to satisfy
them. For nonprofit organizations, shareholders include the people they
serve and the funding sources on which they depend. Once these corpo-
rate goals have been clearly identified, the organization should be able to
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