Organization design viewed as a group process using coordination technology

Abstract

This dissertation defines an enactable change process that specifies how an organization designs, or redesigns, itself to adapt to changing internal and external pressures. J. Christopher Jones defined design as initiation of change in man-made things.$\sp\dag$ This dissertation is concerned in particular with the design of organizations. It is the first articulation of a new paradigm for organization change. The paradigm, which shares many of the change process attributes prescribed by the participative management and sociotechnical system design advocates, defines organization design as an organic change process potentially involving everyone in the organization and those significantly associated with the organization, such as stakeholders, bond holders, union members, consultants, regulators, and customers. The process addresses the designing not of an individual product, but of a whole system, an environment. The design process produces change not only in the organization (the thing being designed) but also in the people in the organization and in the organizations and the people with which the organization interacts. This pervasiveness of change forces the design process to be a continuous, ongoing activity, which leads to one of the key assumptions of the dissertation: repetitive activities are prime candidates for technology support. We describe a prototype technology that supports organization design as an ongoing group process. The technology consists of two fully integrated pieces: (1) an interactive, multi-user, graphical editor for generating process descriptions and (2) an associated group process for using the editor to design organizations, which is expressed in the modeling language supported by the editor. A major contribution of this dissertation is a set of Role Interaction Nets (RINs) that defines a Group Process of Organization Design (GPOD). The GPOD RINs specify a meta-process for organization design, which incorporates the key elements for successful change that were found in fourteen case studies of large-scale organization change. The GPOD RINs are more explicit than any of the organization design and change processes described in the literature--they are sufficiently detailed that they could be used to guide an organization design process in the real world. The use of the GPOD RINs within a computer-supported coordination system is also described in detail, for it is only through the definition-instantiation-enactment-redefinition cycle that we can realize the continuous nature of the organization design process. ftn$\sp\dag$Jones, J. C., Design Methods, 1980 Edition, Great Britain: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1985.