Reengineering organizational structures from within

Abstract

The GroupOrga (Groupware-based Organization design) project examines how structural organization design takes place in its traditional form and also provides a vision of an organization design process. Its objective is to present an architecture of an organization design application environment that supports workflow management systems (WfMS). After specifying the term in the context of GroupOrga, we discuss how collaboration technology can enable better organizational design and design procedures. As a contribution to the WfMS discussion, we examine how traditional WfMS are constructed in respect to organizational design processes and point out their current weaknesses. The paper explains the linkage between WfMS and organization design systems. As a major focus, the varying types of workflow and organization design users in an organization are examined and their involvement in the organizational design process is discussed. The result is a scale of user classes that ranges from employees who only want to get informed to those who actively and regularly participate in the design. In this paper, it is made clear how one enables participative organization design with diverse applications such as Web-based tools. In conclusion, some impediments to distributed organization design are named and commented upon.