Organization
and job design
Organization
design is related to job design in that if you have designed all the jobs
or positions in an organization then you by definition will have designed
the organization.
Organization
design
Organization design usually refers to
the senior levels of the organisation: How are the key resources bundled
up? How are relationships managed? Where are key strategic objectives
driven from? What are the key processes that link the whole lot together?
In
the IT function the key elements to be addressed by an
organization design relate to relationship, project, service
delivery and resource
management. You can set out the principles behind the design in general
terms ('we will have relationship managers facing the business') before
you descend to specifics ('we will have the following six relationship
manager jobs ....'). And then there's the selection of people 'The Finance
relationship manager position will be occupied by ...').
One
question often asked is: is there a set process that, if followed, will
unerringly take us to the optimal organization structure? The answer is
'No.' Here are a few reasons why:
Different
IT functions have different priorities. For example where efficiency is
critical, resource management arrangements may be very different to a
situation where business relationships are the more critical.
Different
companies operate on different scales. Some arrangements work well with
large, or small, numbers of people.
Personalities
matter, too: IT Directors may have to adjust the details of the structure
to match the capabilities and motivation of the available talent.
Organization
design is likely to be driven by the IT or IS strategy of the company
concerned, with senior roles
focussing on delivery of critical elements.
Organization design can
thus seem
like an art, not a science. But there are some useful questions and
processes that, if heeded, can make the organization design process and
restructuring process more effective: see link on the left.
Job
design
Job
design can refer to technical, or at least non-management, jobs
or to management jobs. Management writers advise designing jobs to give
work variety, a degree of autonomy, etc. and these ground rules are very
helpful. In IT, what are the trends in the design of mainstream jobs?
Starting
with application development areas,
the early themes were about breaking out of the Programmer-Analyst role
separation and moving towards multi-skilled roles such as the Analyst
Programmer. More recently, ERP
systems (e.g. SAP, Oracle Applications) have deskilled application development
jobs, reducing them to configuration consultants who set parameters rather
than write software. And while the ongoing dream of fully automated application building
remains elusive, the availability of new development tools means
unrelenting change in the minutiae of application development jobs of all
kinds.
In
infrastructure operations, and notably
in data centres of one kind or another, there has been constant change in
IT jobs for at least twenty years. Technology vendors are constantly
automating elements of today's operational and support, threatening but
never succeeding (so far) to make operators of all kinds completely
redundant.
Because
technology is so central to the hands-on technical jobs, job design for
these is largely the remit of technical experts.
The
design of management jobs, on the
other hand, is more familiar to non-technical professionals. Issues like
the span of control, the relationship of each job to its peers and so on
have to be carefully borne in mind.
