Method to Address Complexity in Organizations Based on a Comprehensive Overview

Aleksandra Revina,Ünal Aksu,Vera Meister

doi:10.3390/info12100423

Abstract

Digitalization increasingly enforces organizations to accommodate changes and gain resilience. Emerging technologies, changing organizational structures and dynamic work environments bring opportunities and pose new challenges to organizations. Such developments, together with the growing volume and variety of the exchanged data, mainly yield complexity. This complexity often represents a solid barrier to efficiency and impedes understanding, controlling, and improving processes in organizations. Hence, organizations are prevailingly seeking to identify and avoid unnecessary complexity, which is an odd mixture of different factors. Similarly, in research, much effort has been put into measuring, reviewing, and studying complexity. However, these efforts are highly fragmented and lack a joint perspective. Further, this negatively affects the complexity research acceptance by practitioners. In this study, we extend the body of knowledge on complexity research and practice addressing its high fragmentation. In particular, a comprehensive literature analysis of complexity research is conducted to capture different types of complexity in organizations. The results are comparatively analyzed, and a morphological box containing three aspects and ten features is developed. In addition, an established multi-dimensional complexity framework is employed to synthesize the results. Using the findings from these analyses and adopting the Goal Question Metric, we propose a method for complexity management. This method serves to provide key insights and decision support in the form of extensive guidelines for addressing complexity. Thus, our findings can assist organizations in their complexity management initiatives.

Highlights

As organizations develop and digitize their businesses, the number of interactions and dependencies between their processes, information systems, and organizational units increases dramatically [1]
As the starting point in the method development, we perform an Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on complexity management in organizations, which we describe in the subsections below
Goal Question Metric (GQM) is taken as the basis and extended using the complexity analysis approaches obtained from the SLR, the developed morphological box, and the integrated multi-dimensional complexity framework

Summary

Introduction

As organizations develop and digitize their businesses, the number of interactions and dependencies between their processes, information systems, and organizational units increases dramatically [1]. To deal with this growth, organizations often enhance the technology supporting their businesses. That can affect the structure of these organizations [2]. Such dynamics are likely to bring significant challenges [3]. One prominent challenge organizations have to tackle is a complexity that blocks decision-making and leads to unreasonably high and mainly hidden costs. The lowcomplexity companies employed 66% fewer staff and spent 30% less on technology

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion