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GroupOrga: Organizational Design as Groupware-supported Teamprocess | |
Conventional organization design variables have been used for hundreds of years and they have served organizations well. As competition becomes more intense, organizations will have to react more quickly to environmental change and to competitors. Harder rivalry, a worldwide supply of goods, globalization of the markets and higher expectations of customers put growing pressure on organizations. A major effect can be seen in the increasing speed of technological change, which rearranged the factors of competition in a new way: Time plays the dominant role in the market.
In the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) exist many approaches to overcome this problem. The notions of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) or Workflow Management (WfM) discuss solutions which explicitly address the component time and are aimed to reach an essential improvement in reaction to environmental changes. The crucial problem lies in the development of methods for the implementation of standardized and ad-hoc business processes. However, it will be difficult, and in some instances virtually impossible, to move a traditional organization to adopt new process structures without modifying or dissolving the underlying organizational structure. In order to address this problem in today’s workflow management systems (WfMS), new architectural concepts and technologies for organization design seem to be inevitable. Imperatively necessary is a new overall concept for a quick and always adaptable development and description of an organization's structure. Although this need is well known, inventive visions or concrete models for a future method of organization design are currently only in early conceptual phases.
 | Workflow management systems are designed to offer a multipurpose, structured and at the same time flexible way of managing processes. A seamless concept of workgroup computing and workflow or respectively business process management is desired, which covers the scale from strongly structured processes on the one side to extremely flexible, open and ad-hoc processes on the other side. Nevertheless, these possible changes in the shape and design of business processes should not be affected by the changes, which might be undergone in the organizational layout and design. Especially, the organization of workflow aspects has to be continuously adopted to environmental changes. |
In the long run the surviving organizations will be those which are able to react accordingly, due to their flexible business processes. What is addressed here is the ability to freely configure the process models by inserting or deleting process steps (or tasks), and functions. In addition, the operational workflows must immediately use the new workflow definitions, which follow from these changes without the need for extensive and time-consuming programming in the information system.
GroupOrga (Groupware-based Organization Design) is an approach, which is technologically based on a Groupware platform and which presents an important organizational design component besides a workflow management concept called GroupFlow. The GroupOrga project analyzes preconditions of today’s organization design approaches and presents the basics of an innovative, team oriented and Groupware-based organization design for workflow management and office systems. It examines the notion of traditional organization design aspects. It explores the view that the classical design of organizations remains a fundamental management task for organizations. It then looks closely at how traditional structural design processes are constructed and points out to their weaknesses. An evolutionary and distributed multiple level team-approach to design will be proposed. It will be shown that traditional design processes are no longer adequate for innovative organizations and a new multiple level team design process will be explained instead. Arguments are given why such an advance serves today's requirements better than traditional procedures.
| Furthermore, the project introduces a CSCW based environment for modeling the structures of new organizational forms. It is a Groupware based organization concept which puts the conceptualized approach of distributed and intuitive structure design into action. This concept's base, a comprehensive data model for enterprises, will be delineated and its prototype implementation in a Groupware database will be described. Further, it will be shown that an organizational information base can be advantageous in various application fields, including workflow management. Concluding a graphical tool for design support will be introduced and the overall architecture will be pictured. An outlook on further conceptual ideas, such as an integration with the WWW will be given. |  |
You can get further information plus some references from me. Simply send an email! Some additional information can be found here in the GroupOrga category.
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