Designing The Smart Organization

Filling a gap in the literature, this book offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to learning for corporate strategic development, linking the domains of strategy, organizational design, and learning. To demonstrate how this process drives the boundaries of the practice way beyond the established notion of simple training and management education, the book is filled with detailed case studies from leading global organizations, including Siemens, ABB, BASF, the US Army, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EADS, Novartis, and more. These studies reveal how large-scale corporations are using the power of dynamic corporate learning approaches to drive innovation, enhance cultural values, master post-merger integration, transform business models, enhance leadership culture, build technological expertise, foster strategic change processes, and ultimately increase bottom line results. For any company that wants to compete in the 21st century, Designing the Smart Organization offers inspiring perspectives for integrating corporate learning as a core business practice that will create sustainable strategic and organizational capabilities.

This book offers a multidisciplinary strategy for finding new and more effective human-computer interaction approaches, in particular from a socio-technical perspective, that facilitate the exploration and exploitation of benefits that information technologies (IT) offer organizations. Though the relationship between IT and organizations is certainly very strong, it is also one of the greatest obstacles to securing benefits from their interaction. The participation of organizational users in the planning and design stages of IT interfaces is the main area of human-computer interaction, where a wealth of contributions are positively enriching both the academic and management discussions. Thus, a new approach for managing this relationship is needed, one in which the different stakeholders are suitably taken into account. Moreover, the outstanding success of the 2.0 phenomenon offers an example of a relevant platform where human-computer interaction has been widely developed and exploited. Consequently, this will influence and already is influencing – the way IT and users interact with each other. The book is based on a selection of the best papers – original, double blind peer-reviewed contributions – from the annual conference of the Italian chapter of the AIS, held in Milan, Italy in December 2013.

"The book covers the state-of-the-art concepts and methodologies of smart organization development featuring information and communication technologies"--Provided by publisher.

Why do some firms continually make poor R&D decisions while others can deliver a stream of successful products and services? According to the Mathesons, successful firms have internalized the nine interlocking principles of smart R&D--the building blocks of a corporate culture that emphasize making the right strategic decisions at the right times, and aligning organizational practices to support these decisions and sustain their results. The nine principles include embracing uncertainty, opening information flows, and encouraging systems thinking. Once in place, these values enable companies to make appropriate choices about their R&D planning, portfolio management, and project strategies. The authors stress the importance of evaluating trade-offs, investigating alternatives, and getting buy-in across functions to ensure that decisions will be viable from both technological and managerial perspectives. They use best practice examples from companies including General Motors, Pilkington Glass, and BankOne of Ohio to demonstrate that the methods used to enrich R&D planning can be applied more broadly to create, in effect, the smart organization.

To thrive in today’s rapidly changing, global, dynamic business environment characterized by constant change and disruption, organizations must be able to adapt and innovate to maintain their competitive edge. Organization Design: Creating Strategic & Agile Organizations prepares students to make smart strategic decisions when designing and redesigning organizations. Structured around Galbraith’s Star ModelTM, the text explores five facets of organization design: strategy, structure, processes, people, and rewards. Author Donald L. Anderson distills contemporary and classic research into practical applications and best practices. Cases, exercises, and a simulation activity provide multiple opportunities for students to practice making design decisions. Includes an innovative organization design simulation activity that puts students in the role of a design practitioner!

A pedagogical approach to the principles and architecture of knowledge management in organizations This textbook is based on a graduate course taught at Stevens Institute of Technology. It focuses on the design and management of today's complex K organizations. A K organization is any company that generates and applies knowledge. The text takes existing ideas from organizational design and knowledge management to enhance and elevate each through harmonization with concepts from other disciplines. The authors—noted experts in the field—concentrate on both micro- and macro design and their interrelationships at individual, group, work, and organizational levels. A key feature of the textbook is an incisive discussion of the cultural, practice, and social aspects of knowledge management. The text explores the processes, tools, and infrastructures by which an organization can continuously improve, maintain, and exploit all elements of its knowledge base that are most relevant to achieve its strategic goals. The book seamlessly intertwines the disciplines of organizational design and knowledge management and offers extensive discussions, illustrative examples, student exercises, and visualizations. The following major topics are addressed: Knowledge management, intellectual capital, and knowledge systems Organizational design, behavior, and architecture Organizational strategy, change, and development Leadership and innovation Organizational culture and learning Social networking, communications, and collaboration Strategic human resources; e.g., hiring K workers and performance reviews Knowledge science, thinking, and creativity Philosophy of knowledge and information Information, knowledge, social, strategy, and contract continuums Information management and intelligent systems; e.g., business intelligence, big data, and cognitive systems Designing Knowledge Organizations takes an interdisciplinary and original approach to assess and synthesize the disciplines of knowledge management and organizational design, drawing upon conceptual underpinnings and practical experiences in these and related areas.

This book brings together research and theory about integrated care ecosystems with modern Socio-Technical Systems Design. It provides a practical framework for collaborative action and the potential for better care in every sense. By combining the aspirations, information, resources, activities, and the skills of public and private organizations, independent care providers, informal care givers, patients and other ecosystem actors, this framework makes possible results that none of the parties concerned can achieve independently It is both a design challenge and a call for innovation in how we think about health care co-creation. Illustrative stories from many countries highlight different aspects of integrated care ecosystems, their design and their functioning in ways that allow us to push the operating frontiers of what we today call our health care system. It explains what it means to design higher levels of coordination and collaboration into fragmented care ecosystems and explores who the participants should and can be in that process. Written for a broad audience including researchers, professionals, and policy makers, this book offers readers new thinking about what outcomes are possible and ways to achieve them.

Contributing to recent debate on the emergence of digital and agile work, this book explores the implications for labour and employment relations within and beyond organizational boundaries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the key issues and challenges of digitalization, this collection covers topics such as the gig economy, crowdworking and Industry 4.0. Theory and analysis are combined as the authors examine the impact of digital and smart work on organization, HRM and labour law. With comprehensive empirical evidence for those interested in understanding the more complex trajectories of today’s transforming work relationships, this book will not only appeal to students and academics but also to policy-makers, trade unionists and employers’ organizations.