Smart Organizations Research Articles

Developing smart and safe organizations: an evolutionary approach

PurposeThis paper proposes an evolutionary approach to developing smart and safe organizations based on an alignment of two frameworks, an integrated safety culture model and an intelligent organizational systems model. It argues that diversity of propensities, defined as innate tendencies in individuals or groups to behave in particular ways shapes the potential for growth and evolution of organizations. It highlights the critical role of human systems and leadership in maintaining coherence and dealing with the challenges of increased complexity as organizations evolve.Design/methodology/approachThe paper aligns the Intelligent Organizational Systems (IOS) evolutionary model and the Design for Integrated Safety Culture (DISC) model to describe evolutionary development of safety practice in organizations. The result is an ‘evolution matrix’, that reveal the links between safety performance and organizational evolution.FindingsDevelopment of an organization's capacity for safety consciousness through diversification of propensities and different cohering leadership capabilities gives organizations a new way of improving safety.Practical implicationsThe evolution matrix can be used by leaders to systematically assess and enhance system capacity for addressing safety challenges.Originality/valueThe paper represents the first attempt at exploring the conscious development of safety‐critical organizations from an evolutionary perspective. It advances understanding of how organizations can evolve safely within ever‐changing environments.

Smart organisations: modelling of enablers using an integrated ISM and fuzzy-MICMAC approach

Smart organisations are knowledge-driven, internet worked and dynamically adaptive to new organisational forms and practices, they are learning as well as agile in their ability to create and exploit the opportunities offered. In this paper, the study of an emerging organisational concept under the name ‘smart organisation’ has been undertaken. Enablers of smart organisation have been identified, and then an integrated model of these enablers has been developed by using interpretive structural modelling (ISM) methodology and fuzzy MICMAC. Ranking of these enablers has been obtained. The enablers of smart organisation have further been classified into four categories namely autonomous, linkage, dependent and independent according to their driver power and dependence. A FMICMAC structural model of nine level has been developed. This model may be helpful in implementing the practices of smart organisation.

Cost Cutting Strategies of Organizations Across Different Sectors

The overall impact of the economic downturn is certainly huge and is evident across the world. There are challenges on the multiple fronts. It is time to single-mindedly focus on how to make the organization profitable and grow the business. Companies are looking at innovative ways to improve efficiencies. The new corporate mantra that has come out is about cost optimization. Cost consciousness on the part of companies denotes doing more with less. The economic downturn is impacting every organization irrespective of the size. The smarter organizations are looking at cost-cutting and optimization in a strategic and tactical way as cost cutting is the answer to sustainability and profitability. More emphasis was given on layoffs, salary cuts, production cuts, loss of perks for the employees and overhead cuts to protect the bottom lines. Employees were also being asked to take a vacation, factories were working few days a week and infrastructure costs were being minimized. These are hard times and companies are looking at cost cutting in a big way in order to get out of the mess. By adopting different cost cutting strategies, the organizations are making vast efforts to extricate themselves from the global economic crisis and emerge stronger.

Cost Cutting Strategies of Organizations Across Different Sectors

The overall impact of the economic downturn is certainly huge and is evident across the world. There are challenges on the multiple fronts. It is time to single-mindedly focus on how to make the organization profitable and grow the business. Companies are looking at innovative ways to improve efficiencies. The new corporate mantra that has come out is about cost optimization. Cost consciousness on the part of companies denotes doing more with less. The economic downturn is impacting every organization irrespective of the size. The smarter organizations are looking at cost-cutting and optimization in a strategic and tactical way as cost cutting is the answer to sustainability and profitability. More emphasis was given on layoffs, salary cuts, production cuts, loss of perks for the employees and overhead cuts to protect the bottom lines. Employees were also being asked to take a vacation, factories were working few days a week and infrastructure costs were being minimized. These are hard times and companies are looking at cost cutting in a big way in order to get out of the mess. By adopting different cost cutting strategies, the organizations are making vast efforts to extricate themselves from the global economic crisis and emerge stronger.

Systemizing Virtual Learning and Technologies by Managing Organizational Competency and Talents

The article presents promising components and practices of virtual learning and technologies and discusses how systemization can be made through managing organizational competency and talents. The main goal is to suggest how technologies should be incorporated within an organization to improve the effectiveness of employees’ learning, performance, and development. For technology implementation and adoption, we also introduce models for examining organizational maturity levels and integrating technologies.We argue that virtual learning and technologies are fundamentally pressing HRD roles to change from experts of learning and development to work solution partners leading and supporting the creation of a smart organization.

MITs Gain Leadership Opportunities

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Residents' ForumFull AccessMITs Gain Leadership OpportunitiesMelinda Fierros, M.D.Melinda FierrosSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:4 Jun 2010https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.45.11.psychnews_45_11_024In 2009, the APA Board of Trustees sunsetted several councils and committees in an effort to reorganize APA into a leaner, smarter, more efficient, and more effective machine.One of the committees that was sunsetted was the Committee of Residents and Fellows. Since that time, an interim residents' work group has been working to develop a new member-in-training (MIT)-led committee that would exemplify smart organization and innovation. I am happy to report that the Board of Trustees voted at its March meeting to approve the creation of the Corresponding Committee of Members-in-Training (CoMIT), which will report to the Council on Medical Education and Lifelong Learning. It will also submit a report to the Board of Trustees at least once a year, at the president's discretion.The CoMIT will be composed of the member-in-training trustee, who will also chair the committee, the member-in-training trustee-elect, an Assembly Committee of Members in Training (ACOM) representative from each of APA's seven geographic areas, the Residency Review Committee MIT liaison, APA's MIT liaison to the AMA, and one MIT representative from each of APA's nine councils.This new committee will facilitate communication and collaboration among MIT representatives to the APA councils, Board of Trustees, and Assembly and residents involved in the Residency Review Committee and AMA. It will meet monthly via conference call or Skype and was scheduled to meet for the first time at APA's 2010 annual meeting in New Orleans at press time. The price tag for such a large collaborative group, you ask? Under $750 a year. Amazing. Efficient. Brilliant.Among the many tasks that this committee will be spearheading is the initiation of a resident leadership program that will enable MITs to develop leadership skills in their field of interest, with the assistance and guidance of APA.Many of the ideas for this leadership initiative came from a residents forum in March at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training, where residents suggested the development of several Powerpoint presentations on common mental health topics, such as diagnosing and treating depression or OCD, for example. These presentations could be accessed easily by members on the APA Web site; this would facilitate chief residents or faculty “teaching on the fly” while on rounds, thus benefiting both the teacher and those being taught. Others suggested creating modules, again accessible on the APA Web site, on topics particularly relevant to residents and early career psychiatrists, such as learning to teach to colleagues at different levels of training, from medical students to faculty; starting a private practice; picking the best electronic medical record system; and tips on mental health coding.Another suggestion was the revamping of the current APA resident communication engine, which has been described by some residents as antiquated, redundant, and inefficient. Steve Koh, a current resident leader on ACOM, has developed a communication proposal that calls for the creation of a more Web-like system of communication; it would immediately assess every new or renewing member's interests, level of involvement, areas of research, and demographics and develop an individualized profile, much as social-networking sites do. At a glance, residents would be able to see where they fit in to APA, the district branch of which they are a member, and the names of national leaders and gain access to instant communication with those leaders. Seamless. Effortless. Exciting.Other endeavors include the development of a formalized mentoring program and collaborating with the APA Elections Committee on the development of a policy for the use of social-networking sites as a campaigning tool.I want to thank you very much for affording me the opportunity to serve as your representative on the Board of Trustees over the last two years. The experience was invaluable, and I consider myself fortunate to have been able to meet and work with the many talented and diligent resident leaders in whose hands I leave you. Stay tuned, as many more trailblazing MIT ideas are about to come to life. Melinda Fierros, M.D., completed her term as the MIT trustee on the APA Board last month. ISSUES NewArchived

Smart Oil and the Development of the Networked Organization

Management Over the last decade, the “intelligent oil field” has been the oil industry’s primary route to becoming smarter. The journey has developed from point technology solutions through collaborative operations to cross-asset optimization. The leaders in this field are transforming their organizations to become instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Instrumented—the exact condition of things can be measured, sensed, and observed. Interconnected—people, systems, and objects can communicate and interact with each other in new ways Intelligent—changes can be responded to quickly and accurately, and better results can be achieved by predicting and optimizing future events Smart oil is providing the opportunity for oil and gas companies to think and act in new ways, allowing them to enhance exploration and production, improve asset management, and optimize global operations. Oil and gas companies have always gathered and managed data and expertise, but this information has largely remained siloed and static. Through extensive instrumentation and integration, a smart organization will aggregate all of these data, together with data from external sources, to achieve real-time visibility of its entire system. It will use these data to generate intelligent insights that will be shared within assets and functions, and throughout the organization, driving targeted actions to ensure efficient, safe, and environmentally sound operations. Many oil and gas organizations began their efforts in collaboration by implementing local collaborative environments or centers with high-tech communications, visualization, and audio-enhanced monitoring or control rooms that enable more effective data collection, monitoring, communications, and knowledge and information sharing. These environments are designed to help resources make more informed decisions and to take the appropriate actions across the enterprise (Chapman et al. 2008). History has seen organizations implement local centers supporting one single operation, regional centers supporting multiple operations and in some cases global remote support centers (RSCs) supporting the entire organization (Roberts et al. 2009). The visibility and insight provided by smart oil will provide the opportunity to leverage skills across the entire organization, enabling the move away from collaborative environments, through a combination of collaborative environments and network, to realize the fully networked organization (Fig. 1). The fully net-worked organization will liberate staff from the constrained “point-to-point” communication that occurred in the past to the flexible “any-to-any” collaboration of the future. This move to a global networked organization will present challenges to today’s organizations, which often consist of a collection of autonomous business units linked to a central headquarters. Staff in autonomous asset-based teams will have to evolve to become a global team. The networked organization will require more collaboration across current function, asset, partner, and supplier boundaries.

Breaking through the Project Fog: How Smart Organizations Achieve Success by Creating, Selecting and Executing On-Strategy Projects

Breaking through the Project Fog: How Smart Organizations Achieve Success by Creating, Selecting and Executing On-Strategy Projects

Breaking Through the Project Fog: How Smart Organizations Achieve Success by Creating, Selecting and Executing On‐Strategy Projects

Breaking Through the Project Fog: How Smart Organizations Achieve Success by Creating, Selecting and Executing On‐Strategy Projects

The e‐learning library: only a warehouse of learning resources?

The potentialities of information technology, together with economic concerns, have been forcing various organizations to go electronic in order to reposition themselves toward a sustainable future. This has also happened to libraries, whose primary value lies not only in their collections but also in their contribution to education through smart organization and management of collected information, which they make easily usable and accessible to users. The paper addresses these issues and discusses such aspects as what is meant by “learning”, how can it be pursued and managed in the library environment, what is the functionality of the e‐learning library, and how the e‐learning resources are included and organized in the e‐learning library.

Smart Organizations Perform Better

OVERVIEW:Identifying linkages between the use of best practices and overall measures of corporate performance is difficult. Studies of several hundred companies, however, show that underlying cultural and organizational patterns lead to effective implementation of many best practices, which the authors call the “principles” of a smart organization. These patterns, which are measured with an organizational IQ test, correlated positively with overall corporate performance, leading to the conclusion that smart organizations perform better.

Towards the smart organization: An emerging organizational paradigm and the contribution of the European RTD programs

The new economy is the result of the information revolution, of shrinking and ever more powerful computers, and the emergence of an efficient, ubiquitous and invisible communications infrastructure. It is characterized by three distinctive attributes: it is global, it favors intangible things—ideas, information, knowledge, relationships, and it is intensely inter-linked. As more and more organizations prepare to “go digital”, only few of them really seem to recognize what implications this transition will have on their business processes and on the organization as a whole. The transformation involves much more than setting up a digital infrastructure and requires even more than the ability to enter into a virtual collaboration with other partners. Organizations need to become “smart”, i.e. knowledge driven, internetworked, dynamically adaptive to new organizational forms and practices, learning as well as agile in their ability to create and exploit the opportunities offered by the digital economy. The article considers technologies and trends towards inter-operable tools for organizational agility and flexibility based on distributed business operations. The European Commission has been supporting these developments through its various research programmes since the early 1980s. Besides the notable research and technological development (RTD) achievements, important progress has also been made in the area of standardization and through consensus building between the research and business communities in Europe. It is further recognised that technology alone will not be able to sustain the creative potential of the digital economy if the socio-economic, the legal and regulatory frameworks are not adequately taken into account.

Do smarter systems make for smarter organizations?

This article explores the role of knowledge-based systems (KBS) in knowledge management (KM). KM is considered an umbrella term, incorporating various issues related to the value of knowledge as a production factor. This study assesses three research themes which together address the main object of KM. First, how do the introduction and utilization of KBS affect the organizational core competencies? Secondly, is the knowledge content of products and services affected by KBS? Thirdly, how do these systems affect job quality? The results of an empirical investigation in 24 knowledge-intensive, commercial organizations show that KBS usually have a positive impact on organizational competencies. They reveal that KBS may both threaten and enhance the knowledge content of certain tasks. They also show that, in general, the introduction of KBS leads to a slight decrease in job quality.

Two Roads Diverged in the Yellow Wood of Incrementalism

Two Cases, one of urban synoptic‐style planning, one of university strategic‐style planning, are reported and analyzed with reference to other planning styles. Planning style is identified as a key construct in a setf‐reinforcing loop connecting world view and organizational culture, all of which are considered as semantic systems. The evolution of organizational forms is traced to forecast the emergence of smart organizations as a result of the introduction of strategic planning. Recent events in the continuing case study are appended. [futures research, organizational culture change, planning styles, semantic systems, smart organizations]

The Effect of Management Information System in Transition to Smart Organizations/ An Analytical study at Al-Qalam University College

The current study aims at identifying the effect of Management Information System on the transformation of universities and smart colleges from the viewpoint of the employees of the AL-Qalam University College / Kirkuk. The research has used the descriptive analytical method, and the questionnaire was the main tool for collecting data from the research community, which consists of (40) members of the academic and administrative staff in the college under study. The study reached a set of conclusions, namely: 1. Management Information System has an important and effective role in the transition to smart universities. 2. There is a positive correlation between Management Information System and the dimensions of transition to smart universities. 3. There is a positive effect relationship between Management Information System and the dimensions of transition to smart universities.