The external environment to organizations is constantly changing; it is important that organizations adapt to the demands of the present day in order to get the best performance and benefit of their available resources. For this purpose there is the need to begin a process of change in the Portuguese Air Force. The aim of this project was to obtain better information to support decision processes aiming to increase self-awareness, agility, and flexibility of the organization by adapting information systems to strategy. The comparison of the methodology for its implementation on the ground with consolidated and verified theories of change is very important to analyze, in a systematic way, including all the relevant factors to its understanding, and it is also imperative to take into account success or failure issues. This chapter describes the change process, its contributions to improve the value of information, and the role of Academia through conceptual thinking reflected on the work done in master theses.
TopConcepts For Change
There are numerous methodologies and methods related to the change of the organization which involve the establishment and articulation of the assumptions needed to start manufacturing processes and analyze and report how those really changed the organization.
Concepts related to the transformation and innovation as self-awareness, flexibility and agility are treated by various disciplines, including the Organizational Engineering established and studied by the Center for Organizational and Design Engineering (CODE) in Lisbon, which decides the application of the concepts in the organization mentioned above.
This section describes and relates the principles of organizational engineering to concepts applied to the transformation and innovation in the organization, placing them in the midst of change strategies advocated by modern scientists such as Kotter (1996).
In the context of change, it is also important the strategy and the way to deal with resources in the process, including how to lead and avoid errors that may occur.
All and all, enterprise changes need to uncover new ways of getting competitive advantage through better objective analysis and definition processes. It all comes to better information that can lead to better decisions.
Organizational Engineering
Organizational Engineering (OE) comes as a set of principles and practices that aim to answer the following question: “How to draw and improve on a holistic approach, all elements associated with a company using analysis methods and tools to better achieve that the organization meets its strategic objectives,” (Macedo et al, 2005).
The aim of OE is to increase efficiency, effectiveness, communication and coordination, and it should be possible to apply it to any type of organization and to all areas that need an improvement in their performance (OEI, 2009).
Concepts such as self-awareness and agility are essential to the success of the organization.
The notion of self-awareness as a concept of OE is of extreme importance to the organization. People must know who they (and others) are in the organization and what and how they (and others) are doing things (Vicente & Tribolet, 2007). Thus, if the organization has a strong self-awareness, it will know its strengths, limitations, values and motivations (Northup, 2010) and the employees will be directed by common objectives.
OE strives for agility, which represents the ability to act quickly with a management effort in the accurate response to change. It also represents the ability to initiate changes in order to achieve business advantage (Allen, 2006).