There are many things about work in today’s organizations that just do not make sense. We observe contradictions, stresses, and tensions everywhere. The advancements of science and technologies, which promised to take away the drudgery of the human condition do not seem to have fulfilled their promise. We have replaced ‘drudgery’ with the new disease of ‘affluenza’. We fondly reflect on the creativity and community spirit of pre-industrial age cottage industries and the subsequent de-humanization of the workforce in the assembly line of factories of the industrial age. The notion of ‘sensible organization’ is a return to the human and social values that have disappeared in the modern workplace. Sensible assumptions about most modern organizations, which have complex hybrid structures consisting of hierarchies and networks, is that they are often more like organic ecosystems than machines. Moreover, it makes sense to adopt the position that this mechanistic-organic hybrid is now a natural state of affairs and should not be resisted. Indeed this creates an ideal context for innovation, creativity, and growth—a context in which rational planning should give way to processes that stimulate patterns of propitious emergent activity with an emphasis on sense-making, unstructured decision making, and shared situational awareness.
Published in Chapter:
Complex Organizations and Information Systems
Leoni Warne (Department of Defence, Australia), Helen Hasan (University of Wollongong, Australia), and Henry Linger (Monash University, Australia)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch102
Abstract
In modern organizations, information, and particularly knowledge, is known to be the most strategically important resource. The defining characteristics of modern organizational forms are purported to be flatter hierarchies, decentralized decision making, greater capacity for tolerance of ambiguity, permeable boundaries, capacity for renewal, self-organizing units, continual change, and an increasingly complex environment (Daft & Lewin, 1993; Warne, Ali, Bopping, Hart, & Pascoe, 2004). Yet, many systems that are developed to support organizational activities continue to fail at an alarming rate (Hart & Warne, 2005; Warne, 2002). Many explanations have been offered for such failures (e.g., DeLone & McLean, 1992; Fortune & Peters, 2005; Lyytinen & Hirschheim, 1987; Sauer, 1993; Warne, 2002), but contradictions and stresses continue to confound organizations and their use of information and communications technology (ICT). The challenge for information systems (IS) research and practice is to articulate an organizational paradigm, including its structures, forms, and systems, that will enable the organization to be agile, innovative, and have the capacity to learn. This article discusses some of the parameters for a new contemporary model for organizations.