ALIGNING TECHNOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE:HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY PLANNERS PURSUE ALIGNMENT DESPITE THESE DIFFICULTIES?

HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY PLANNERS PURSUE ALIGNMENT DESPITE THESE DIFFICULTIES?

The difﬁculties identiﬁed in Section 3 are real difﬁculties not likely to go away with new managers, new technologies, new industrial engineering skills, new organizational designs, or new motivations. Therefore, industrial engineers must identify ways to move past these difﬁculties. This means taking the difﬁculties into account when pursuing alignment, rather than ignoring them. Effort then is not spent on reducing the difﬁculties per se, but on managing them so that alignment can still be achieved. Below we propose several ways of pursuing alignment in ways that allow technology planners to move past the difﬁculties.

Focus Alignment on Business Purpose, Driven by Competitive Need, Not as a Technology Fix to a Localized Problem The impact of the difﬁculties identiﬁed in Section 3 is often experienced as resistance to change. Managers argue against a technology; workers refuse to intervene to ﬁx the technology; industrial engineers focus solely on the technology, refusing to consider work and job changes. This resistance to change is often a sign that the justiﬁcation for the technology is weak. Weak justiﬁcations are those where the need for the technology is not driven by competitive advantage pursued by the ﬁrm. Porter (1985), Schlie and Goldhar (1995), Pine (1993), Goldman et al. (1995), and D’Aveni and Gunther (1994), among others, have emphasized the need for technology choices to be driven by the competitive advantage being pursued by the ﬁrm. Yet, as pointed out by Kanz and Lam (1996), traditional strategic management rarely adequately ties technology choices to strategic choices be- cause of a lack of understanding of how technology choices are different from other types of strategic choices (such as new products or cost-cutting strategies). In a two-year study involving over 300 major ﬁrms, they found that while 50 executives believed their ﬁrms tied improvements in their IT infrastructure to a business strategy, only 10 ﬁrms were found to be doing so after a formal assess- ment. Moreover, while 190 executives believed their overall corporate strategies were driving the methodology for implementing their business plans, less than 20 strategies were actually doing so. The remainder were constrained by limitations in either organizational or IT culture and design (Sweat 1999).

Schlie (1996) offers speciﬁc suggestions for identifying how technology choices should be driven by competitive ﬁrm needs. He adopts Porter’s (1985) strategic planning framework, which suggests that competitive advantage can be derived at any point along a ﬁrm’s value chain (e.g., inbound logistics, outbound logistics, marketing / sales, procurement, R&D, human resource management, or ﬁrm infrastructure). For the point on the value chain that the ﬁrm decides to have a competitive advantage, that advantage can be achieved either through cost leadership (i.e., low cost, low price) or differentiation (i.e., uniqueness to the customer). Using this framework, Schlie (1996) suggests that ﬁrm management should ﬁrst decide where in the value chain they will compete, and then how they will use technology to facilitate achieving their competitive advantage. In communicating this to plant personnel, then, justiﬁcation of both the strategic choices as well as how technology helps the strategic choices is required. Schlie cautions, however, that some technologies can only be ade- quately justiﬁed for some of these strategic choices. He uses as an example the advanced manufac- turing technologies CAM and CIM, pointing out that the contribution of these technologies to the competitive advantage of low cost is ambiguous and situation speciﬁc. Yet when ﬁrms justify their technology expenditures based on direct labor savings, that is precisely what they are suggesting. Thus, difﬁculties of alignment will not be overcome if the justiﬁcation for the technology expenditure is suspect from the outset.

While there are many other strategic planning frameworks for integrating technology design choices with strategic choices (e.g., Burgelman and Rosenbloom 1999; Leonard-Barton 1995), the purpose here is not to elaborate the frameworks but to emphasize the need for the technology design choices to be driven by a business strategy—regardless of the framework used—and not by reactive problem solving.

Recognize the Breadth of Factors and Their Relationships That Must Be Designed to Achieve Alignment It is apparent from Section 2.2 that the high failure rates of new technologies are due to the lack of alignment among technology and organizational factors. What are these factors? The U.S. industry’s initiative on agile manufacturing (documented in Goldman et al. 1995) identiﬁed a range of factors, including the production hardware, the procurement process, and the skills of operators. The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences created a program to promote manufacturing ﬁrms to assess themselves on their excellence. The assessment contained 171 factors distributed across 14 areas ranging from supplier development to operations, from cost to ﬂexibility, from health and safety to customer satisfaction. In a ﬁve-year industry–university collaborative effort funded by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, 16 sets of factors were identiﬁed that must be aligned (Majchrzak 1997; Majchrzak and Finley 1995), including:

• Business strategies

• Process variance-control strategies

• Norms of behavior

• Strategies for customer involvement

• Employee values

• Organizational values

• Reporting structure

• Performance measurement and reward systems

• Areas of decision-making authority

• Production process characteristics

• Task responsibilities and characteristics

• Tools, ﬁxtures, and material characteristics

• Software characteristics

• Skill breadth and depth

• Information characteristics

• Equipment characteristics

Within each set, 5–100 speciﬁc features were identiﬁed, with a total of 300 speciﬁc design features needing to be designed to create an aligned organizational-technology solution for a new technology. In this ﬁve-year study, it was also found that achieving alignment meant that each of these factors needed to be supportive of each other factor. To determine whether a factor was supportive of another factor, each factor was assessed for the degree to which it supported different business strategies, such as minimizing throughput time or maximizing inventory turnover. Supportive factors were then those that together contributed to the same business strategy; inversely, misaligned solutions were those for which design features did not support similar business strategies.

Recognizing this range of factors and their relationships may seem overwhelming; but it can be done. The cross-functional teams and use of CAD technologies for developing the Boeing 777 aircraft present an excellent example of alignment. In designing the 777, Boeing created approximately 240 teams, which were labeled ‘‘design-build teams.’’ These teams included cross-functional representa- tives from engineering design, manufacturing, ﬁnance, operations, customer support, maintenance, tool designers, customers, and suppliers (Condit 1994). To communicate part designs, the teams used 100% digital design via the 3D CAD software and the networking of over 2000 workstations. This allowed the suppliers to have real-time interactive interface with the design data; tool designers too were able to get updated design data directly from the drawings to speed tool development. In addition, the CAD software’s capability in performing preassembly checks and visualization of parts allowed sufﬁcient interrogation to determine costly misalignments, interferences, gaps, conﬁrmation of tolerances, and analysis of balances and stresses (Sherman and Souder 1996). In sum, the tech- nology of CAD was aligned with the organizational structure of the cross-functional teams.

Understand the Role of Cultures in Alignment

Culture affects alignment by affecting the change process: changes that support the existing culture are easier to implement successfully than changes that cause the culture to change. At least two types of culture must be considered in designing a technology-organization solution: the national culture of the country and the culture of the organization.

According to Schein (1985), organizational culture is ‘‘a pattern of basic assumptions—invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration—that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.’’ Kotter and Heskett (1992, p. 4) contend that organizational culture has two levels that differ in terms of their visibility and their resistance to change:

At the deeper and less visible level, culture refers to values that are shared by the people in a group and that tend to persist over time even when group membership changes. . . . At the more visible level, culture represents the behavior patterns or style of an organization that new employees are automatically encouraged to follow by their fellow employees. . . . Each level of culture has a natural tendency to inﬂuence the other.

Operationally, organizational culture is deﬁned as a set of shared philosophies, ideologies, values, beliefs, expectations, attitudes, assumptions, and norms (Mitroff and Kilmann 1984). Cultural norms are the set of unwritten rules that guide behavior (Jackson 1960). Use of this concept allows the capturing of those dimensions of organizational life that may not be visible in the more rational and mechanical aspects of the organization.

Cultures can be characterized not only by their focus but also by their strength (O’Reilly 1989; Beyer 1992). Strong cultures exert greater conformity on organizational members than weak cultures. The stronger the culture, then, the more difﬁcult it will be to implement a technology-organization alignment that contrasts with that culture. For example, if a knowledge-management repository is installed, workers are unlikely to contribute to the repository if there is a strong culture that encour- ages independence and heroism (Davenport 1994) Thus, in designing a technology-organization so- lution, the existing culture of the organization should be carefully considered and, if possible, used to foster the solution.

National culture, according to anthropologists, is the way of life of a people—the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes, customs, and material goods. According to Azimi (1991), the culture of a society consists of a set of ideas and beliefs. These ideas and beliefs should have two principal characteristics or conditions: ﬁrst, they should be accepted and admitted by the majority of the population; and second, the acceptance of these beliefs and ideas should not necessarily depend upon a scientiﬁc analysis, discussion, or convincing argument. Also, national culture, in the context of technology transfer and utilization, could operationally be deﬁned as the ‘‘collective mental pro- gramming of peoples’ minds’’ (Hofstede 1980a).

National culture affects not only the safety but also the success and survival of any technology. National cultures differ on at least four basic dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity (Hofstede 1980b). Power distance is the extent to which a society accepts the fact that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally. It is an indication of the interpersonal power or inﬂuence between two entities, as perceived by the less powerful of the two (BCAG 1993). Uncertainty avoidance is the extent to which a society feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations. It also refers to attempts to avoid these situations by providing greater career stability, establishing more formal rules, not tolerating deviant ideas and behaviors, and believing in absolute truths and the attainment of expertise. Individualism is charac- terized by a loosely knit social framework in which people are supposed to take care of themselves and their immediate families only, while collectivism is characterized by a tight social framework in which people distinguish between in-group and out-group; they expect their in-group members (e.g., relatives, clan, organization) to look after them, and in exchange they owe absolute loyalty to the group. The masculinity dimension expresses the extent to which the dominant values in a society are ‘‘masculine,’’ as evidenced by decisiveness, interpersonal directness, and machismo (Johnston 1993). Other characteristics of masculine cultures include assertiveness, the acquisition of money and ma- terial goods, and a relative lack of empathy and reduced perceived importance for quality-of-life issues. This dimension can also be described as a measure of the need for ostentatious manliness in the society (BCAG 1993). Femininity, the opposite pole of this continuum, represents relatively lower assertiveness and greater empathy and concern for issues regarding the quality of life.

The four cultural dimensions discussed above also have signiﬁcant implications for most complex technological systems’ performance, reliability, and safety. For instance, according to Helmreich (1994) and Helmreich and Sherman (1994), there is evidence that operators with high power distance and high uncertainty avoidance prefer and place a ‘‘very high importance’’ on automation. Further- more, it is known that the primary purpose of regulations is to standardize, systematize, and imper- sonalize operations. This is done, to a large extent, by ensuring adherence to (standard and emergency) operating procedures. On many occasions it requires replacing operators’ habits with desirable inten- tions that are prescribed in procedures or enforced by regulations. However, according to several studies, an operator’s culturally driven habit is a more potent predictor of behavior than his or her intentions, and there could be occasions on which intentions cease to have an effect on operators’ behavior (Landis et al. 1978). This fact places in question the effectiveness of those regulations and procedures that are incompatible with operators’ culturally driven habits.

A major, though subtle, factor affecting the safety and performance of a technological system is the degree of compatibility between its organizational culture and the national culture of the host country. It is an inevitable reality that groups and organizations within a society also develop cultures that signiﬁcantly affect how the members think and perform (Schein 1985).

Demel (1991) and Demel and Meshkati (1989) conducted an extensive ﬁeld study to explore how the performance of U.S.-owned manufacturing plants in other countries is affected by both the na- tional culture of the host country and the organizational culture of the subsidiary plant. A manufac- turing plant division of a large American multinational corporation was examined in three countries: Puerto Rico, the United States, and Mexico. Hofstede’s (1980a) Values Survey Module for national culture and Reynolds’s (1986) Survey of Organizational Culture were administered. Performance measures (i.e., production, safety, and quality) were collected through the use of secondary research.

The purpose of this investigation was threefold:

1. To determine whether there were any differences among the national cultures of Puerto Rico, the United States, and Mexico

2. To ﬁnd out whether there were any differences between the organizational cultures of the three manufacturing plants

3. To establish whether there was any compatibility between the organizational culture of the plants and the national culture of the three countries, and examine whether the compatibility (or incompatibility) affected their performance in terms of production yields, quality, safety, and cycle time

Although the results of this study indicate that there are differences among the national culture dimensions of Puerto Rico, the United States, and Mexico, no signiﬁcant differences were found between the organizational cultures of the three plants. This may be due to selection criteria, by which candidates, by assessment of their behavioral styles, beliefs, and values, may have been care- fully screened to ﬁt in with the existing organizational culture, Additionally, socialization may have been another factor. This means that the company may have had in-house programs and intense interaction during training, which can create a shared experience, an informal network, and a company language. These training events often include songs, picnics, and sporting events that build a sense of community and feeling of togetherness. Also, the company may have had artifacts, the ﬁrst level of organizational culture, such as posters, cards, and pens that remind the employees of the organi- zation’s visions, values, and corporate goals and promote the organization’s culture.

Therefore, it seems that a ‘‘total transfer’’ has been realized by this multinational corporation. Because these manufacturing plants produce similar products, they must obtain uniform quality in their production centers. To gain this uniformity, this company has transferred its technical installa- tions, machines, and organization. Moreover, to fulﬁll this purpose, the company chooses its em- ployees according to highly selective criteria. Notwithstanding, Hofstede’s research demonstrates that even within a large multinational corporation known for its strong culture and socialization efforts, national culture continues to play a major role in differentiating work values (Hofstede 1980a).

There are concepts in the dimensions of organizational culture that may correspond to the same concepts of the dimensions of national culture:

The power distance dimension of national culture addresses the same issues as the perceived oligarchy dimension of organizational culture. They both refer to the nature of decision making; in countries where power distance is large, only a few individuals from the top make the decisions. Uncertainty avoidance and perceived change address the concepts of stability, change, and risk taking. One extreme is the tendency to be cautious and conservative, such as in avoiding risk and change when possible in adopting different programs or procedures. The other is the predisposition to change products or procedures, especially when confronted with new challenges and opportunities—in other words, taking risks and making decisions. Uncertainty avoidance may also be related to perceived tradition in the sense that if the employees have a clear perception of ‘‘how things are to be done’’ in the organization, their fear of uncertainties and ambiguities will be reduced. An agreement to a perceived tradition in the organization complements well a country with high uncertainty avoidance. Individualism–collectivism and perceived cooperation address the concepts of cooperation between employees and trust and assistance among colleagues at work. In a collectivist country, cooperation and trust among employees are perceived more favorably than in an individualist country.

The perceived tradition of the organizational culture may also be related to individualism- collectivism in the sense that if members of an organization have shared values and know what their company stands for and what standards they are to uphold, they are more likely to feel as if they are an important part of the organization. They are motivated because life in the organization has meaning for them. Ceremonies of the organizational culture and rewards given to honor top perform- ance are very important to employees in any organization. However, the types of ceremonies or rewards that will motivate employees may vary across cultures, depending on whether the country has a masculine orientation, where money and promotion are important, or a feminine orientation, where relationships and working conditions are important. If given properly, these may keep the values, beliefs, and goals uppermost in the employees’ minds and hearts.

Cultural differences may play signiﬁcant roles in achieving the success of the corporations’ per- formance. The ﬁndings of this study could have important managerial implications. First, an orga- nizational culture that ﬁts one society might not be readily transferable to other societies. The organizational culture of the company should be compatible with the culture of the society the company is transferring to. There needs to be a good match between the internal variety of the organization and the external variety from the host country. When the cultural differences are un- derstood, the law of requisite variety can then be applied as a concept to investigate systematically the inﬂuence of culture on the performance of the multinational corporations’ manufacturing plants. This law may be useful for examining environmental variety in the new cultural settings. Second, the ﬁndings have conﬁrmed that cultural compatibility between the multinational corporations’ or- ganizational culture and the culture of the countries they are operating in plays a signiﬁcant role in the performance of the corporations’ manufacturing plants.

Therefore, it can be suggested that the decision concerning which management system or method to promote should be based on speciﬁc human, cultural, social, and deeply rooted local behavior patterns. It is critical for multinational corporations operating in different cultures from their own to ensure and enhance cultural compatibility for the success of their operations. As a consequence, it can be recommended that no organizational culture should be transferred without prior analysis and recommendations for adjustment and adaptation to the foreign countries’ cultures and conditions. This research has given a clear view of the potential that currently exists for supervising and eval- uating cultural and behavioral aspects of organizations as affected by their external environment and their relationship to the performance of the organizations. Culture, both national and organizational, will become an increasingly important concept for technology transfer.

Results showed that while there were differences between the national cultures of the three coun- tries, there were no signiﬁcant differences between the organizational cultures of the three manufac- turing plants. It is noteworthy that the rank order of the performance indicators for these plants was in exact concordance with the rank order of the compatibility between the organizational culture and the national culture of the host country: Mexico had the highest overall cultural compatibility and the highest performance; Puerto Rico had high overall compatibility and the next-highest overall performance; and the United States had the lowest cultural compatibility and the lowest overall performance.

Meshkati has recently studied the concept of a ‘‘safety culture.’’ Nuclear reactor operators’ re- sponses to nuclear power plant disturbances is shown in Figure 1 (Meshkati et al. 1994, adapted from Rasmussen 1992). The operators are constantly receiving data from the displays in the control

room and looking for change or deviation from standards or routines in the plant. It is contended that their responses during transition from the rule-based to the knowledge-based level of cognitive control, especially in the knowledge-based level, are affected by the safety culture of the plant and are also moderated or inﬂuenced by their cultural background. Their responses could start a vicious cycle, which in turn could lead to inaction, which wastes valuable time and control room resources. Breaking this vicious cycle requires boldness to make or take over decisions so that the search for possible answers to the unfamiliar situation does not continue unnecessarily and indeﬁnitely. It is contended that the boldness is strongly culturally driven and is a function of the plant’s organizational culture and reward system and the regulatory environment. Boldness, of course, is also inﬂuenced by operators’ personality traits, risk taking, and perception (as mentioned before), which are also strongly cultural. Other important aspects of the national culture include hierarchical power distance and rule orientation (Lammers and Hickson 1979) which govern the acceptable behavior and could determine the upper bound of operators’ boldness.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, two general components of the safety culture are the necessary framework within an organization whose development and maintenance is the responsibility of management hierarchy and the attitude of staff at all different levels in responding to and beneﬁting from the framework (IAEA 1991). Also, the requirements of individual employees for achieving safety culture at the installation are a questioning attitude, a rigorous and prudent approach, and necessary communication. However, it should be noted that other dimensions of na- tional culture—uncertainty avoidance, individualism–collectivism, and masculinity–femininity— while interacting with these general components and requirements, could either resonate with and strengthen or attenuate safety culture. For instance, the questioning attitude of operators is greatly inﬂuenced by the power distance, rule orientation, and uncertainty avoidance of the societal environ- ment and the openness in the organizational culture of the plant. A rigorous and prudent approach that involves understanding the work procedures, complying with procedure, being alert for the unexpected, and so on is moderated by power distance and uncertainty avoidance in the culture and by the sacredness of procedures, the criticality of step-by-step compliance, and a deﬁnite organiza- tional system at the plant. Communication which involves obtaining information from others, trans- mitting information to others, and so on, is a function of all the dimensions of national culture as well as the steepness and rigidity of the hierarchical organizational structure of the plant.

The nuclear industry shares many safety-related issues and concerns with the aviation industry, and there is a continuous transfer of information between them (e.g., EPRI 1984). Cultural and other human factors considerations affecting the performance of a cockpit crew are, to a large extent, similar to those affecting nuclear plant control room operators. Therefore, it is worth referring brieﬂy to a fatal accident involving a passenger airplane in which, according to an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB 1991), national cultural factors within the cockpit and between it and the air trafﬁc control tower contributed signiﬁcantly to the crash. Avianca ﬂight 052 (AV052) (Avianca is the airline of Colombia), a Boeing 707, crashed in Cove Neck, New York, on January 25, 1990, and 73 of the 158 persons aboard were killed. According to the NTSB:

The NTSB determines that the probable cause of this accident was the failure of the ﬂight crew to adequately manage the airplane’s fuel load, and their failure to communicate an emergency fuel situation to air trafﬁc control before fuel exhaustion occurred. (NTSB 1991, p. 76, emphasis added)

The word ‘‘priority’’ was used in procedures’ manuals provided by the Boeing Company to the airlines. A captain from Avianca Airlines testiﬁed that the use by the ﬁrst ofﬁcer of the word ‘‘priority,’’ rather than ‘‘emergency,’’ may have resulted from training at Boeing. . . . He stated that these personnel received the impression from the training that the words priority and emergency conveyed the same meaning to air trafﬁc control. . . . The controllers stated that, although they would do their utmost to assist a ﬂight that requested ‘‘priority,’’ the word would not require a speciﬁc response and that if a pilot is in a low fuel emergency and needs emergency handling, he should use the word ‘‘emergency.’’ (NTSB 1991, p. 63; emphasis added)

The NTSB concluded:

The ﬁrst ofﬁcer, who made all recorded radio transmissions in English, never used the word ‘‘Emergency,’’ even when he radioed that two engines had ﬂamed out, and he did not use the appropriate phraseology published in United States aeronautical publications to communicate to air trafﬁc control the ﬂight’s mini- mum fuel status. (NTSB 1991, p. 75, emphasis added)

Helmreich’s (1994) comprehensive analysis of the AV052 accident thoroughly addresses the role of cultural factors. His contention is that had air trafﬁc controllers been aware of cultural norms that may inﬂuence crews from other cultures, they might have communicated more options and queried the crew more fully regarding the ﬂight status. . . . The possibility that behavior on this [ﬂight] was dictated in part by norms of national culture cannot be dismissed. It seems likely that national culture may have contributed to [the crew’s behavior and decision making]. . . . Finally, mistaken cultural assumptions arising from the interaction of two vastly different national cultures [i.e., crew and ATC] may have prevented effective use of the air trafﬁc control system. (Helmreich 1994, p. 282)

These conclusions have been corroborated in principle by several other studies: an operator’s cultur- ally driven habit is a more potent predictor of behavior than his or her intentions, and there could be occasions on which intentions cease to have an effect on operators’ behavior (Landis et al. 1978). This fact brings to question the effectiveness of those (safety-related) regulations and procedures that are incompatible with operators’ culturally driven habits.

According to Helmreich (1994):

In a culture where group harmony is valued above individual needs, there was probably a tendency to remain silent while hoping that the captain would ‘‘save the day.’’ There have been reported instances in other collectivist, high power distance cultures where crews have chosen to die in a crash rather than disrupt group harmony and authority and bring accompanying shame upon their family and in-group. (Emphasis added) High Uncertainty Avoidance may have played a role [in this accident] by locking the crew into a course of action and preventing discussion of alternatives and review of the implications of the current course of action. High Uncertainty Avoidance is associated with a tendency to be inﬂexible once a decision has been made as a means of avoiding the discomfort associated with uncertainty.

Moreover, the importance of the cultural factors vis-a`-vis automation in the aviation industry is further highlighted by two recently published studies. Helmreich and Merritt (1998), in their study of national culture and ﬂightdeck automation, surveyed 5705 pilots across 11 nations and report that ‘‘the lack of consensus in automation attitudes, both within and between nations, is disturbing.’’ They conclude that there is a need for clear explication of the philosophy governing the design of auto- mation. Most recently, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Human Factors Study Team issued a report (FAA 1996). The team identiﬁed several ‘‘vulnerabilities’’ in ﬂight crew management of automation and situation awareness that are caused by a number of interrelated deﬁciencies in the current aviation system, such as ‘‘insufﬁcient understanding and consideration of cultural differences in design, training, operations, and evaluation.’’ They recommend a host of further studies, under the title of ‘‘Cultural and Language Differences.’’ Moreover, they include pilots’ understanding of auto- mation capabilities and limitations, differences in pilot decision regarding when and whether to use different automation capabilities, the effects of training, and the inﬂuence of organizational and national cultural background on decisions to use automation.

Make Organization and Technology Design Choices That Encourage Innovation The difﬁculties discussed in Section 3 suggest that even when a comprehensive technology- organization solution is devised, the unpredictability of the process by which technologies and or- ganizational change unfolds will inevitably lead to unplanned events. Simply creating a portfolio of contingency plans is likely to be insufﬁcient because contingencies to cover all unplanned events cannot be identiﬁed in advance. Thus, technology-organization solutions are more likely to be suc- cessful when they allow for innovation at the individual and group level. That is, even if careful plans have been made for everything from critical technical features for maintainability to redesigned job descriptions and performance-incentive systems, changes to these features, descriptions, and sys- tems should be not only permitted but encouraged as personnel struggle to make the technology suit their work process.

In a careful analysis of six failed information systems developments, Flowers (1997) found that one of the main reasons for failure was an attitude in which failure, or association with failure, was likely to result in scapegoating or possible loss of employment or else have a severe effect upon the careers of the individual or individuals involved. For example, in the report of the inquiry on the failure of the London Ambulance system, the negative effect on the implementation of a senior manager was noted: the senior manager instilled a fear of failure by being very powerful, with a determination not to be deﬂected off course. Kelley (1996), in a survey of almost 1000 manufacturing plants, found that group-based employee participation mechanisms that supported the reexamination of old routines and taking advantage of informal shortcuts that employees had worked out on their own were complementary—especially in higher technology ﬁrms—to the productive use of infor- mation technology in the machining process.

Another example of the need for individual and group-level innovation is a recent study of the implementation of a collaborative technology to allow an interorganizational virtual (i.e., distributed across time and location) team to conceptualize and develop a new product. (Majchrzak et al. 2000). The eight-person team was encouraged to indicate the features they wanted in a collaborative tech- nology. They asked for a central repository on a central server that could capture all types of knowl- edge (from text to drawings), mechanisms for cataloguing the knowledge for easy retrieval later (such as keywords, dates, author identiﬁcation, and reference links to previous related entries), mechanisms for being informed when new knowledge relevant to their area of expertise was entered into the knowledge base (e.g., proﬁling their interests coupled with e-mail notiﬁcation when an entry ﬁt that proﬁle), ability to link desktop applications interactively to the knowledge base (called hot links), templates for commonly captured knowledge (such as for meeting agendas, meeting minutes, action items, decision rationale), and access anywhere by anyone anytime (24 X 7 access by team members and managers). A system was developed to these speciﬁcations. Then the team was encouraged to develop a set of coordination norms for how to conduct their creative engineering design work virtually using the collaborative technology. They created a new work process that would encourage all members of the team (including suppliers and specialists) and external managers to enter all knowledge asynchronously into the knowledge base and for each member then to comment on the entries as need be. The team worked for 10 months and successfully developed a breakthrough product. What is relevant for this discussion is that while the team had the opportunity to create its own technology and work process at the outset, in the end it changed every single one of its norms and most of the ways in which it used the technology. Thus, while there was careful planning prior to the beginning of the team’s work—far more planning than would normally be permitted in many organizations today—the team still found it necessary to make changes. The team was fortunate because it were encouraged and able to make those changes as they became necessary. The technology was designed sufﬁciently ﬂexibly so that entries could be identiﬁed using simple searches rather than the complex navigation tools that they thought they might need. Management was sufﬁciently ﬂexible that when the team asked them to stop using the technology, they obliged. The team’s work process was sufﬁciently ﬂexible that when asynchronous communication proved insufﬁcient, they were able to add a ‘‘meet-me’’ teleconference line so that all future encounters could be synchronously con- ducted using both the collaborative technology and the teleconference capability. Thus, the team succeeded not only because there had been careful planning, but because they could also innovate their work process and the technology as problems arose.

Thus, critical to the success of technology-organization alignment is that the technology- organization solution be designed to encourage localized innovation (Johnson and Rice 1987; Rogers 1995), that is, innovation required to make a particular technology-organization solution work in a particular context with a particular set of people. Characteristics of solutions that allow localized innovation include:

Solutions That Enhance, Not Deskill Workers

When workers are deskilled from a technology-organization solution, they do not have the knowledge to be able to intervene when necessary, identify problems, formulate solutions, and then implement the solutions. Thus, solutions must not permit deskilling. Technologies that avoid deskilling are those that allow workers to understand what the technology is doing and how it is doing it and provide workers with ways to intervene in the process to perform the planning, thinking, and evaluation work, leaving the routine work to the technology (Majchrzak 1988). The collaborative technology used by the virtual team members described in Majchrzak et al. (2000) was entirely open, with no hidden formula, hidden menus, or hidden processing; thus, the team was able to evolve the technology to the point where they could it make useful to them. CNC machines that hide processing logic from the operators are examples of technologies that violate this principle and thus inhibit innovation.

Solutions Should Be Human Centered

A broader proposition than that solutions should not deskill workers is that solutions should be human centered, that is, solutions should focus on how people use information, not simply on how to design a better, faster, cheaper machine. Davenport (1994) lists guidelines for designing human-centered information systems:

• Focus on broad information types, rather than on speciﬁc computerized data.

• Emphasize information use and sharing rather than information provision.

• Assume transience of solutions rather than permanence.

• Assume multiple rather than single meanings of terms.

• Continue design and reinvention until desired behavior is achieved enterprise wide rather than stopping the design process when it is done or system is built.

• Build point-speciﬁc structures rather than enterprise-wide structures.

• Assume compliance is gained over time through inﬂuence rather than dictated policy.

• Let individuals design their own information environments rather than attempt to control those environments.

Human-centered automation initiative is a good example of the technologies that attempt to avoid deskilling of human operators (Billings 1996). Loss of situation awareness, which could have been caused by ‘‘glass cockpit’’ and overautomation, have been cited as a major cause of many aviation mishaps (Jentsch et al. 1999; Sarter and Woods 1997). Also, in many cases, because of the afore- mentioned issues, automation only aggravates the situation and becomes part of the problem rather than the solution. For example, in the context of aviation, automation is even more problematic because it ‘‘ampliﬁes [crew] individual difference’’ (Graeber 1994) and ‘‘it ampliﬁes what is good and it ampliﬁes what is bad’’ (Wiener 1994). Furthermore, the automated devices themselves still need to be operated and monitored by the very human whose caprice they were designed to avoid. Thus, the error is not eliminated, only relocated. The automation system itself, as a technological entity, has a failure potential that could result in accidents. The problem arises when an automated system fails; it inevitably requires human intervention to ﬁx it in a relatively short time. The same operators who have been out of the loop, may have ‘‘lost the bubble’’ (Weick 1990) with respect to cause and effect of the system failure and been deskilled, must now skillfully engage in those very activities that require their contributions to save the day (Meshkati 1996; Roberts and Grabowski 1996).

Deskilling is not necessarily limited to technical skills; blind automation tends to undermine interpersonal skills as well as encourage performance in isolated workstations and ingrains an indi- vidualistic culture in the organization. According to an analysis of high-reliability systems such as ﬂight operations on aircraft carriers by Weick and Roberts (1993), a culture that encourages individ- ualism, survival of the ﬁttest, macho heroics, and can-do reactions is often counterproductive and accident prone. Furthermore, interpersonal skills are not a luxury but a necessity in high-reliability organizations.

Solutions That Integrate Across Processes, Not Bifurcate

Technology-organization solutions that create more differentiation between jobs hurt innovation be- cause the problems that arise during implementation are rarely limited to an action that a single person holding a single job can solve. For example, an engineer may not have realized that by speeding up a processing step, she has added a greater queue for inspection, which, if left unresolved, will lead to quicker but more faulty inspections. To solve this problem requires that both quality control and manufacturing work together. For this reason, solutions that are focused on improvements to entire processes—that is, a process-based view of the organization—tend to be more successfully implemented than solutions that are focused on individual functions (Majchrzak and Wang 1996).

Solutions That Encourage Knowledge Recognition, Reuse, and Renewal Localized innovation can be costly if the solutions themselves are not captured for later potential reuse. That is, if every single context is allowed to experiment through trial and error and generate different ways to handle the problems that arise during solution implementation, and this experimen- tation is done without the beneﬁt of a knowledge base or technical staff to support knowledge transfer across contexts, the end cost of all the localized solutions can be very high. Thus, each site should have available, and be encouraged to use, a knowledge repository that describes various ways to resolve the different difﬁculties it is likely to encounter. Moreover, to make such a knowledge re- pository effective, each context should be encouraged to contribute to the knowledge repository so that future implementations can beneﬁt from their learning (McDermott 1999). For example, a per- centage of consultants’ pay at Ernst & Young is determined by their contribution to the central knowledge repository (called Ernie) and the uses by other consultants made of their entries.

Solutions Should Decentralize Continuous Improvement

For people to engage in localized innovation, they must both be motivated to do so and have the ability to do it. Motivation can be encouraged by the provision of incentives through reward-and- recognition programs as well as by management offering a consistent message and modeling behavior that everyone should continuously improve what they do. Ability to innovate can be provided through such classic continuous improvement skills as ‘‘ﬁve whys,’’ Pareto analysis, graphing actual vs. expected outcomes over time, and group problem-solving techniques. Finally, a cycle of continuously evolving on-site experimentation that enables technology and context eventually to ‘‘ﬁt’’ should be encouraged (Leonard-Barton 1988). ‘‘Such experimentation can range from scientiﬁc investigations of new materials to beta testing a product prototype with potential customers, and from mathemati- cally simulating product performance to studying product aesthetics via physical models’’ (Iansiti 1999, p. 3–55). Expecting everyone to become knowledgeable about continuous improvement tech- niques and then motivating everyone to use those techniques can help to encourage localized inno- vation.

Agree on a Change Process for Achieving Alignment

The difﬁculties identiﬁed in Section 3 are better managed when the process by which the technology- organization solution is designed and implemented is an orderly, known, and repeatable process.

People become anxious when they are thrust into chaotic situations over which they have no control and which affect their jobs and possibly their job security and careers (Driver et al. 1993). People are given some sense of control when they know what the process is: how decisions will be made, by whom, and when, and what their role is in the decision-making and implementation process. Sociotechnical systems design suggests the following nine steps in the design and implementation of a technology-organization solution (Emery 1993; Taylor and Felten 1993):

1. Initial scanning of the production (or transformation) system and its environment to identify the main inputs, transforming process, outputs, and types of variances the system will encounter

2. Identiﬁcation of the main phases of the transformation process

3. Identiﬁcation of the key process variances and their interrelationships

4. Analysis of the social system, including the organizational structure, responsibility chart for controlling variances, ancillary activities, physical and temporal relationships, extent to which workers share knowledge of each others’ roles, payment system, how roles ﬁll psychological needs of employees, and possible areas of maloperation

5. Interviews to learn about people’s perceptions of their roles

6. Analysis of relationship between maintenance activities and the transformation system

7. Relationship of transformation system with suppliers, users, and other functional organizations

8. Identiﬁcation of impact on system of strategic or development plans and general policies

9. Preparation of proposals for change

These nine steps have been created to optimize stakeholder participation in the process, where stakeholders include everyone from managers to engineers, from suppliers to users, from maintainers to operators. A similar process is participative design (Eason 1988; Beyer and Holtzblatt 1998), tenets of which include:

• No one who hasn’t managed a database should be allowed to program one.

• People who use the system help design the infrastructure.

• The best information about how a system will be used comes from in-context dialogue and role playing.

• Prototyping is only valuable when it is done cooperatively between users and developers.

• Users are experts about their work and thus are experts about the system; developers are tech- nical consultants.

• Employees must have access to relevant information, must be able to take independent positions on problems, must be able to participate in all decision making, must be able to facilitate rapid prototyping, must have room to make alternative technical and / or organizational arrangements, must have management support but not control, must not have fear of layoffs, must be given adequate time to participate, and must be able to conduct all work in public.

The participative design process ﬁrst involves establishing a steering committee of managers who will ultimately be responsible for ensuring that adequate resources are allocated to the project. The steering committee is charged with chartering a design team and specifying the boundaries of the redesign effort being considered and the resources management is willing to allocate. The design team then proceeds to work closely with the technical staff ﬁrst to create a set of alternative orga- nizational and technical solutions and then to assess each one against a set of criteria developed with the steering committee. The selected solutions are then developed by the design and technical per- sonnel, with ever-increasing depth. The concept is that stakeholders are involved before the technol- ogy or organizational solutions are derived and then continue to be involved as the design evolves and eventually makes the transition to implementation (Bodker and Gronbaek 1991; Clement and Van den Besselaar 1993; Kensing and Munk-Madsen 1993; Damodaran 1996; Leonard and Rayport 1997).

Both the participative design and STS processes also focus on starting the change process early. Typically, managers wait to worry about alignment after the technology has been designed, and possibly purchased. Because too many organizational and other technology choices have now been constrained, this is too late (Majchrzak 1988). For example, if the data entry screens for an enterprise resource-planning system are designed not to allow clerks to see the next steps in the data ﬂow, and the organizational implications of this design choice have not been considered in advance, clerks may well misunderstand the system and input the wrong data, leading to too many orders being sent to the wrong locations. This is what happened at Yamaha. If the enterprise resource-planning system had been designed simultaneously with the jobs of clerks, then the need to present data ﬂow infor- mation would have been more apparent and the costly redesign of the user interface would not have been required. Thus, starting the change process before the technology has been designed is critical to achieve alignment.

Finally, a change process must include all best practices of any project management structure, from metrics and milestones to skilled project managers and contract administration. Too often, the implementation of a technology-organization solution is not given the organizational sanction of a project and instead is decomposed into the various functional responsibilities, with the integration being assigned to somebody’s already full plate of responsibilities. A project manager is needed who is responsible for the entire life cycle, from design to implementation to use, and whose performance is based on both outcome metrics (e.g., the extent to which the solution contributed to the business objectives) and process metrics (e.g., did people involved in the design ﬁnd that their time was well spent?). The project manager needs to report to a steering committee of representatives from each stakeholder community, and the steering committee should hold the program manager accountable to following best-practice project-management principles such as

1. Clear descriptions of speciﬁcations and milestones that the solution must meet

2. Risk identiﬁcation, tracking, and mitigation

3. Early and iterative prototyping with clear testing plans including all stakeholders

4. A formal process for tracking requests for changes in speciﬁcations

Finally, given the key role played by the project manager, the job should not be given to just anyone. While small technology-organizational solutions might be handled by an inexperienced project man- ager, provided there is some formal mentoring, the larger the project, the greater the need for ex- perience. With larger projects, for example, experience is required in contract administration (e.g., devising contracts with service providers that offer them the type of incentives that align their interests with yours), coordination of distributed teams, managing scope creep, and balancing conﬂicts of interests. These skills are not speciﬁc to a technology; but they are speciﬁc to project management expertise. The Conference Board, for example, found that problematic enterprise resource planning installations were attributable to the use of poor project-management principles that were speciﬁc not to the technology but rather to the scale of the change required (Cooke and Peterson 1998). Thus, a planned change process is critical to the ability to overcome difﬁculties of alignment.

Use Decision Aids to Enhance Internal Understanding of Technology-Organizational Alignment A ﬁnal recommendation for managing the difﬁculties of alignment is to use computerized decision aids that have a sufﬁcient knowledge base to offer guidance on how to align technology and orga- nizational options under various contexts. In this way, a company can reduce its reliance on outside consultants while it iteratively strives for better and better alignment. Paciﬁc Gas & Electric seemed to appreciate the need to take technology and organizational development in-house, according to the Wall Street Journal (1998b), when it decided to use a team of 300 company employees in its $200 million, four-year effort to rebuild the company’s aging computer system. Big-name consulting ﬁrms were eschewed, in favor of small consulting ﬁrms, but only in supporting roles. As with any simu- lation package used in industrial engineering, such a decision aid should allow what-if modeling, that is, the ability to try out different technology-organizational solutions and see which are more likely to achieve the desired outcomes at the least cost. Such a decision aid should also incorporate the latest best practices on what other ﬁrms have been able to achieve when aligning their organi- zations and technologies. Finally, such a decision aid should help the ﬁrm to conduct a cross- functional comprehensive assessment of the current alignment state of the ﬁrm and compare it to the to-be state to identify the high-priority gaps that any new solution should resolve. In this section, we describe two decision aids, TOP Modeler (www.topintegration.com) and iCollaboration software (www.adexa.com).

TOP Modeler

TOP Modeler is a dynamic organization analysis, design, and reengineering tool (Majchrzak and Gasser 2000). TOP Modeler uses a ﬂexible, dynamic modeling framework to deliver a large, well- validated base of scientiﬁc and best-practice knowledge on integrating the technology, organizational, and people (TOP) aspects of advanced business enterprises. The current focus of TOP Modeler’s knowledge base is advanced manufacturing enterprises, although it can be expanded to other types of enterprises. TOP Modeler’s knowledge base was developed with a $10 million, ﬁve-year investment of the U.S. Air Force ManTech program, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, Digital Equipment Corporation, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes, General Motors, and the Uni- versity of Southern California.

Users have the choice of using TOP Modeler to evaluate their current organization or evaluate their alternative ‘‘to-be’’ future states. Users do this by describing their business strategies and being informed by TOP Modeler of an ideal organizational proﬁle customized to their business strategies. Then users can describe features of their current or proposed future organization and be informed by TOP Modeler of prioritized gaps that need to be closed if business strategies are to be achieved. There are three sets of business strategies contained in TOP Modeler: business objectives, process variance control strategies, and organizational values. TOP Modeler also contains knowledge about the relationships among 11 sets of enterprise features, including information resources, production process characteristics, empowerment characteristics, employee values, customer involvement strat- egies, skills, reporting structure characteristics, norms, activities, general technology characteristics, and performance measures and rewards.

The TOP Modeler system has a graphical, interactive interface; a large, thorough, state-of-the-art knowledge representation; and a ﬂexible system architecture. TOP Modeler contains a tremendous depth of scientiﬁc and best-practice knowledge—including principles of ISO-9000, NCMS’s Manu- facturing 2000, etc.—on more than 30,000 relationships among strategic and business attributes of the enterprise. It allows users to align, analyze, and prioritize these attributes, working from business strategies to implementation and back. The user of TOP Modeler interacts primarily with a screen that we call the ferris wheel. This screen provides an immediate, intuitive understanding of what it means to have TOP integration in the workplace: TOP integration requires that numerous different aspects of the workplace (e.g., employee values, information, and responsibilities for activities) must all be aligned around core organizational factors (e.g., business objectives) if optimum organizational performance is to be achieved.

TOP Modeler has been used in over 50 applications of organizational redesign, business process redesign, or implementation of new manufacturing technology. The companies that have used it have ranged from very small companies to very large companies, located in the United States, Brazil, and Switzerland. Some of the uses we have been informed about include:

• Use by government-sponsored manufacturing consultants (e.g., Switzerland’s CCSO) to help small companies develop strategic plans for restructuring (in one case, the tool helped the consultant understand that the company’s initial strategic plan was unlikely to succeed until management agreed to reduce the amount of variation that it allowed in its process).

• Use by large software vendors (e.g., EDS) to help a company decide to not relocate its plant from one foreign country to another (because the expense of closing the ‘‘gaps’’ created by the move was likely to be too high).

• Use by a large manufacturing company (General Motors) to decide whether a joint venture plant was ready to be opened (they decided on delaying the opening because the tool helped to surface differences of opinion in how to manage the workforce).

• Use by a small manufacturing company (Scantron) to decide whether its best practices needed improving (the tool helped the company to discover that while it did indeed have many best practices, it needed to involve the workforce more closer with the supplier and customer base, an action the company subsequently took).

• Use in a large technology change effort at a large manufacturing company (Hewlett-Packard) to help identify the workforce and organizational changes needed for the new production tech- nology to operate correctly (resulting in a substantial improvement in ramp-up time when the new product and production process was introduced).

• Use by a redesign effort of a maintenance crew (at Texas Instruments) to determine that the team-based approach they had envisioned needed several important improvements prior to start- up.

• Use by a strategic planning committee at a large manufacturing company to identify areas of misalignment among elements of a new strategic plan (in this case between quality and through- put time).

• Use by a manufacturing division manager to verify his current business strategy, which had been given to him by his group manager. As a consequence of using TOP Modeler, he discov- ered that he had agreed to a business objective of new product development without having the authority over the necessary people, skills, and other resources to deliver on that objective. He went back to his group manager to renegotiate these resources.

These are just a few examples of the uses made of TOP Modeler. We believe that with a decision aid, the difﬁculties of achieving alignment are substantially reduced.

iCollaboration Tool for Technology-Organizational Realignment

Another powerful decision aid for the (intra- and interenterprise) technology-organization alignment that is currently being used by many companies in different industries is the state-of-the-art, Internet- enabled Adexa company’s iCollaboration software (www.adexa.com). These manufacturing and service industries include electronics, semiconductor, textile and apparel, and automotive. Adexa tools provide a continuous and dynamic picture of a manufacturing enterprise supply chain and operational status at all times.

iCollaboration software suite enables users to dynamically address and monitor operational plan- ning, materials management, order management and request for quotes (RFQs), strategic and oper- ational change propagation, new product management, collaborative customer and demand planning, and customer satisfaction.

The main feature of the iCollaboration suite include:

1. An integrated / synchronized set of supply chain and operations planning tools that cover the strategic planning (facilities, products, supplies

2. Supply chain planning (sourcing, making, storing)

3. Material and capacity planner; detailed make and deliver, factory planning

4. Reactive dynamic scheduler shop-ﬂoor scheduling, dispatch lists

Figure 2 shows a conceptual architecture of Adexa iCollaboration suite and how it interfaces both intra- and interenterprise. The following is a review of some speciﬁc areas, examples, and improve- ments where the iCollaboration tool could help the enterprise in systematic integration of technology into an organizational setting.

Operational Planning Operational planning in this context encompasses all the activ- ities: forecasting, demand planning, sourcing, production planning, and shipping. The strategic plan should be aligned with the tactical and operational so that every decision at all levels is consistent; any deviations should be immediately relayed and approved or rejected. The supply chain planner (SCP) and the global strategic planner (GSP) tools create strategic plans that are feasible at lower levels, thus eliminating / minimizing unnecessary monitoring. Each planner (demand, materials, pro- duction, etc.) is working from the most current plans and has visibility into what is possible, which leads to linear-empowered organizations. Every change in market demand or supply chain problem is immediately reﬂected and visible, allowing an optimal replan based on prevalent situations. Ma- terials, manufacturing resources, skills, and shippers all operate in synch, thus eliminating expeditors and facilitators. The GSP, SCP, material and capacity planner (MCP), collaborative demand planner (CDP), collaborative supply planner (CSP), and collaborative enterprise Planner (CEP) tools enable the management to align its organizations and coordinate functions (e.g., centralized vs. decentralized planning, ability to manage customer or product lines by one person or department) effectively to meet its business goals.

Materials Management The materials organization or individual responsible for raw materials, subassembly suppliers, feeder plants, and ﬁnished goods management needs full visibility into all requirements and changes as they happen. Based on the enterprise, these functions may be aligned by product family, facility, or material type. The material managers have access to the latest long-term forecasts and plans, any market changes, order status and changes, effectivities, part sub- stitutions, and all speciﬁc rules as they apply to the vendor or supplier, and the latest company rules regards products, materials, customers, or priorities. The enterprise is thus free to align the organi- zation to achieve lowest inventories, lowest material-acquisition costs, best vendor contracts (reduced set of reliable suppliers, quality, etc.), effective end-of-life planning, and reduced obsolescence.

Order Management and Request for Quotes (RFQs) An organization, which is re- sponsible for the ﬁrst line of attack on responding to RFQs, order changes, new orders, new custom- ers, should be able to respond rapidly and accurately to delivery capability and costs. More importantly, the response should be based on the current plant loads and reﬂects the true deliverable lead times and capabilities.

Strategic and Operational Change Propagation As is the norm, strategies and opera- tional activities change for various internal or external reasons. Most organizations without access to the right technology manage this change by incurring high costs in terms of additional people both to convey the message of change and to manage and monitor. Visibility and instant change propa- gation in either direction allow enterprises to respond only when necessary, and they are guided by a system-oriented decision so that their responses are optimal and effective immediately.

New Product Management New product development, engineering, materials, sales, and production functions require seamless collaboration. Business processes that take advantage of these functionalities can be implemented so that new product introduction is as much a part of day- to-day operations as the making and delivery of current products. There may not necessarily be a need for any special organizations or stafﬁng to meet new product introductions. These products become akin to new demands on resources; and in fact, with the added visibility and speed of change propagation, the enterprise can develop better-quality products and more of them. This can be done because an enterprise utilizing a tool such as iCollaboration can easily try out more ideas and func- tions simultaneously, which increases the ability of the enterprise to ramp up production faster

Collaborative Customer / Demand Planning The CDP tool allows the customer-facing individuals to evaluate and analyze the demands by sales organizations, geography, product managers, and manufacturing and product planners to interact and control all activities seamlessly and consistent with enterprise goals of maximizing proﬁtability and related corporate strategies. The application of this tool may result in the synchronization among the entire sales and customer relationship teams, in conjunction with customer relationship management (CRM) integration, which would produce customer satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction Customer satisfaction, as measured by product delivery due date performance, accurate order ﬁll rate, response to quotes, and response to changes in orders, can be signiﬁcantly enhanced by creating an empowered customer facing organization that is enabled and empowered. It should be noted that this issue is one of the most critical determinants of success for today’s e-commerce businesses. With the iCollaboration tools, an organization can create customer- facing organizations that may be aligned with full customer responsibility, product responsibility, order responsibility, or any combination of those. These organizations or individuals are independent, do not have to call someone, and yet are in synch with all other supporting organizations.

5. CONCLUSIONS

A review of possible decisions leaves a long list of do’s and don’ts for implementing new technology. Some of the more important ones are:

• Don’t regard new technology and automation as a quick ﬁx for basic manufacturing or human resource problems; look to the ﬁrm’s entire human–organization–technology infrastructure as the ﬁx.

• Don’t assume that human resource problems can be resolved after the equipment is installed; some of the problems may have to do with the speciﬁc equipment selected.

• Do expect that multiple different conﬁgurations of matches of human–organization–technology infrastructure elements are equally effective as long as the organization can undergo all the needed changes.

• Do expect to redesign jobs of operators, technical support staff, and supervisors.

• Do involve marketing staff in resources planning.

• Don’t look for broad-brush deskilling for skill upgrading of the workforce with new technology; rather, some new skills will be required and others will no longer be needed.

• Don’t make direct labor the prime economic target of new technology; the displacement of direct labor is only a small part of the economic beneﬁt of the new technology.

• Do perform a training-needs analysis prior to any employee training relating to the implemen- tation of the new technology; do expect a substantial increase in training cost.

• Do expect that the union–management relationship will change dramatically.

• Do begin facing the dilemma of changing the organizational structure to meet both coordination and differentiation needs.

• Do expect resistance; begin convincing managers and the workforce of the need for change before installing the new technology.

• Do use a multidisciplinary project team to implement any new technology in the workplace.

• Do assess and incorporate all aspects of new technology in the implementation decision making, such as social and environmental impacts.

• Do ensure a thorough understanding of the dimensions of local national culture.

• Do ascertain a determination of the extent of national culture match with those of organizational culture of the technological system (to be implemented).

• Do ensure that the effects of cultural variables on the interactions between human operators and automation in control centers of technological systems are fully considered.

The foregoing ideas concerning technology alignment with organization are of paramount im- portance for the companies in this emerging era of e-commerce and e-business, which is the ideal test bed for the full implementations of these ideas. The new industrial revolution being precipitated by the advent of the e-commerce phenomenon is probably the most transformative event in human history, with the far-reaching capability to change everything from the way we work to the way we learn and play. The e-commerce industry has empowered customers more than ever and has further required seamless coordination and information exchange among inter- and intraorganizational units responsible for dealing with customers and suppliers. For instance, Dell Computer, a pioneer and a harbinger of the e-commerce industry, has created a fully integrated value chain that allows for a three-way information partnership with its suppliers and customers, thereby improving efﬁciency and sharing the beneﬁts across the entire chain. (Economist 1999). Product managers, manufacturing, and product planners need to interact and control all activities seamlessly with full transparency to the customer. This holistic approach necessitates the utmost efﬁciency of the entire production life cycle and eventually requires addressing all environmental impacts of e-business.

The new world order for business and industry mandates that technology implementation be comprehensive and must encourage continuous evolution and that it needs tools to help the process of implementation.

Search This Blog

Operation Research course