Large bureaucratic organizations, and the people who work in them, are facing rapid and substantial changes which require new understandings, skills, and capabilities for the network-centric environment. In some of the early literature, the term ‘network-centric’ only referred to the connectivity achieved through technological networks, in particular the Internet and Web-enabled applications. However its connotation has expanded as ICT networks and applications are transforming the ways in which people gather, share and process information and knowledge, and consequently, on the ways they make decisions to act. This is having an impact in organizations: on their structures, their ways of working, on organizational learning, as well as on the ways people collaborate and form social networks. Many organizations are now hybrids of a traditional hierarchy, with a limited command and control structure, and a network-centric configuration allowing the emergence of self-directed groups. The domain of network-centrism now encompasses the organizational, social and cultural as well as the technical aspects of working in these changing, hybrid environments.
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.