engleski

Structural Couplings of Organizational Design and Organizational Engineering

Autopoiesis research which constitutes a theory of complex, non-linear and especially living systems, provides a suitable framework for analyzing organizational systems as organizationally closed and autonomous entities. These entities are able to self-organize through what we commonly denote with organizational design. They interact with their environment through a process known as structural coupling in which they influence the structure of the environment what in turn often triggers changes in the structure of the very entity. This process is of special interest when two organizationally closed entities interact. We usually say that they are languaging, which is the process of using language. Note that the term language here is used in a much broader sense then in its usual (human) meaning. Language is here not a set of structured symbols, but a set of actions which influence the structure of the other system. In terms of organizations its effects can be changes in individual sense-making of employees, changes in a database or other computer based model, changes in money flow from customers or even changes in marketing channels. In the following chapter the gap between organizational design and organizational engineering is approached by analyzing various entities which are part of the process of shaping organizational architecture and its computer based embodiment in form of IS/IT alignment. If we observe an organization as an autopoietic entity we might conceptualize its interactions with IT as a structural coupling the result of which should be a functional and up-to-date software system which suits the needs of the entity’s strategic endeavors. But this often isn’t the case and we might ask the question why is that so? If we observe this coupling in more detail we find that it is much more complex than initially envisaged. The organizational system in fact couples not to IT directly, but indirectly through a software product like an ERP system or similar, which has been implemented or adapted for the entity. The result of this coupling are the data and “knowledge” bases of the organization. This software system is in turn a product of some other social system like a software firm, the IT department or even an open source community. Thus, the organization couples to this software producing entity as well by communicating its organizational design artifacts to it. The software producing entity then couples to the actual IT, while the result of this coupling is the software product. These couplings can become even more complex if the software producing, adapting, support and administering entities are not one and the same. Now, since this intermediary between the organization and IT cannot be circumvented (except maybe for IT firms) the bottleneck of this complex system seems to be the coupling between the organization and the software producing/adapting/administering entities. The result of this coupling is a mutual sense-making between the entities about the actual design of the organization which might be described in terms of languaging. The analysis of this language should bring us a few steps closer to the answers to some of the following questions: How should the organization communicate its organizational design artifacts in order to ensure that the software product suits its needs and is always up-to-date? Another question might be, could the software agent produce systems that allow for more profound coupling between the organization and the IT product? Or we might ask the opposite question: how should the internal organizational design process be adapted to produce valuable results in both couplings?

structural coupling, languaging, autopoiesis theory, organizational design and organizational engineering

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