Digital Organizations Enhancement With Information and Operational Technologies Convergence

Introduction

The new technologies open the space for changing the way that business works. During the process of changing business environment the organization successfully take new position on the regional and global scene. The old tools of organizational design are not well-suited to success in new markets. Competitive advantage in new markets requires a capability to sense, shape and take new market opportunities. This means that continuous improvement of existing capabilities is not enough, but organizations should develop new capabilities that anticipate and respond to new opportunities in marketplace. Currently, digital environments push new demands on information processing in organizations. For an organization to gather these opportunities it must obtain and process current and reliable information and it asks for dynamic organization capabilities. Thus, in the process of designing organizations for dynamic capabilities there is a need for capturing information, knowledge, and experience and use it all in collective decision making. The mission of the organizational designer is to design structures that put employees in contact with their appropriate environments, and to design processes that help learning, sharing and aggregation of individual knowledge so that the collective organization can make appropriate decisions. The individual capabilities of actors must be turned into collective capabilities making an organization prepared for operating at new market environments. Opposite to traditional organization design that is centered on structural relationships actor-oriented design is centered on shared access to information and other resources as well as the protocols and infrastructures by which actors connect and collaborate. Digital organizations can apply an actor-oriented design at their origin. However, traditional organizations must be redesigned. Redesign involves changing a predominantly hierarchical system supported by legacy technologies to an actor-oriented system (Langer, 2017). Having targeted a particular area for redesign, designers and decision-makers need to address each of the components of the actor-oriented scheme (Snow, Fjeldstad & Langer, 2017).

Organization response to technological changes was dominantly gradual and enabled by information technology improvements that provide larger scope and dimensionality of organizational control and coordination. Such adaptive responses were made within existing hierarchical organization. In the context of digital technologies deployment, traditional organizations are not appropriate and require adaptation through collaboration as well as self-organization around situation awareness and knowledge commons. It is due to the fact that self-organization and collaboration, as an adaptive response, is faster and more effective than a hierarchical response. Furthermore, Rachinger (2018) states that new forms of cooperation between organizations lead to new products and service offerings as well as new forms of organization relationships with customers and employees.