FBI Case study
An organization’s design is made keeping in mind the decision making principle of the company and the flow of information (both formal and informal) within the company. Four organizational structures are the most common to all organizations, namely: hierarchical, flat, matrix and networked.
The hierarchical structure comprises of a top level management and keeps getting segmented to different levels depending on the work that has to be done. The decision making is done by the topmost level management in the structure while the lower level work force follows the rules made by their seniors. The lower levels are grouped basing on their department of function such as marketing, sales, production etc., or they are divided as divisional teams with people from different functional units working towards a common project. The IS in such a structure is merely used for store or communicate information among the different levels. Such a structure is suited for highly stabilized business.
A flat organization structure is found Entrepreneurial organizations where the decision making is mainly done by the owner. But the decision making is not restricted to the owner, it may vary depending on the business need. As business grows and company becomes bigger with more employees a flat organization tends to change to a hierarchical structure with the similar use of IS.
In Matrix organizational structure, the work force does not report to a single supervisor but to supervisors/managers of different departments basing on their business strategy. IS enables to reduce the complexity of information sharing by making the information available to all the supervisors at the same time. The drawback of such a complexity is however confusion in decision making and overloading of information to managers.
The network organizational structure is was introduced to remove the inflexibilities associated with a hierarchical or flat structure. It is decentralized unlike the other structures,
The hierarchical structure comprises of a top level management and keeps getting segmented to different levels depending on the work that has to be done. The decision making is done by the topmost level management in the structure while the lower level work force follows the rules made by their seniors. The lower levels are grouped basing on their department of function such as marketing, sales, production etc., or they are divided as divisional teams with people from different functional units working towards a common project. The IS in such a structure is merely used for store or communicate information among the different levels. Such a structure is suited for highly stabilized business.
A flat organization structure is found Entrepreneurial organizations where the decision making is mainly done by the owner. But the decision making is not restricted to the owner, it may vary depending on the business need. As business grows and company becomes bigger with more employees a flat organization tends to change to a hierarchical structure with the similar use of IS.
In Matrix organizational structure, the work force does not report to a single supervisor but to supervisors/managers of different departments basing on their business strategy. IS enables to reduce the complexity of information sharing by making the information available to all the supervisors at the same time. The drawback of such a complexity is however confusion in decision making and overloading of information to managers.
The network organizational structure is was introduced to remove the inflexibilities associated with a hierarchical or flat structure. It is decentralized unlike the other structures,
References: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/who-killed-the-virtual-case-file http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbis-virtual-case-file-system file:///C:/Users/srilakshmi/Downloads/4%20CIIMA2011-10-2%20Marchewka%201-14.pdf http://www.computerworld.com/article/2543770/it-management/survey--poor-communication-causes-most-it-project-failures.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak http://www.netage.com/pub/Stories/Stories-Eastman.pdf