If the business understands itself in relation to its context, it should be able to determine whether it requires organizational design to become viable.
Given “VUCA” digital new normal, today’s business is often operational in crisis and conflict environments. Thus, from an organizational structural perspective, the overly rigid organizational hierarchy will stifle changes and decelerate business flow.
Integrating organizational design into the process design: Organizational design is an ultimate expression of the business strategy, and strategic alignment occurs on multiple levels, from process configuration to resource allocation. The successful process improvement initiatives should have representation and input from organizational design management. It needs to expand the lens for catching a holistic business perspective and optimize business management disciplines.
Process people are best suited for information/workload flow mapping, but organizational design people and senior management are best suited for realigning functions and management to improve business effectiveness. The strategic intent can be understood across the organizational scope, and the strategic alignment process becomes a harmonized process in which the actual configuration of the organizational strategy is a consequence of organizational design and business strategy implementation. The very goals are to keep improving business effectiveness, efficiency, agility, and maturity.
The process, structure, behavior, and self-interest of individuals and groups, all these factors interact in a dynamic: The organizational design issue is about how to build the best mixture of organizational elements that enable the organizational interdependence and harness adaptability through less hierarchy, frictionless processes, designed to a hyper-connected business dynamic. Digital leaders should have a design mindset to improve organizational people-centricity and maturity; have the process-oriented perspective to continue optimizing business management. Re-designed processes require change in behaviors that may be again out of the comfort zone.
In reality though, the current business paradigm is still dominantly rooted in the mechanistic understanding/framing of the reductionism management discipline. Organizational design reflects the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating business processes and capabilities. It’s important to seize the opportunity, take a fresh look at the organizational structures, processes, evaluate an organizational management approach, enabling the business management to make continuous improvement. High mature digital organizations should enhance organizational re-engineering, to improve business fluidity, productivity, adaptability, people-centricity, and maturity
In customer-driven Organizational Design, the most important internal players are those understanding the “what,” “how,” and “who” – plus the “why”: The self-adaptive organizational system is the one that is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. People-centric organizational design has to be much more “organic” in the sense that it’s melded with the process and even technology. It’s related to how customer-related data should be managed and on which systems often have significant organizational repercussions.
In reality, fewer companies are truly using organizational design resources. But more often, the successful process improvement initiatives should have representation and input from organizational design people management. Technical organizational design knowledge may play a supporting role, but it’s not at the forefront, whichever group is shaping the strategy for an organization has a strong understanding of the organizational architecture and design. There are interdisciplinary players who understand the “what,” “how,” and “who” – plus the “why”; so collaboratively, they are able to drive the change they perceive.
Organizations today are the mix of old and now, hard and soft, visible and invisible components. If the business understands itself in relation to its context, it should be able to determine whether it requires organizational design to become viable. The purpose of organizational design and management optimization is to improve business maturity from functioning to firm to delight, and ultimately achieve high-performance business results.
