Changing Major Acquisition Organizations to Adopt the Best Loci of Knowledge, Responsibilities and Decision Rights
Abstract
The Department of Defense (DoD) is a large, bureaucratic, rule-intensive organization that may no longer be best suited for its new environment. Building upon prior, multidisciplinary research, the authors draw upon the best knowledge and practice in change management and analyze transformation from the classic Hierarchy to the Edge-like Holonistic organization, which offers excellent potential for performance improvement. Such an analysis focuses on the processes of change from one organizational form to another and leads to the generation of transformational plans, which can be used by acquisition leaders, practitioners, and policy makers to outline the steps -- and leaps -- required to effect fundamental organizational change. They also build upon prior work on computational modeling and experimentation to develop models of the transformation process, and then explore such models to emulate the behavior of the alternate transformational plans noted above. By modeling and experimenting with processes of change, as opposed to processes of ongoing organizational routines, the authors begin to extend the state of the art in computational modeling and experimentation. Practically, answers to their research questions have direct and immediate application for acquisition leaders and policy makers. Theoretically, they generalize to broad classes of organizational transformations, and prescribe a novel set of organizational redesign guides.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA458430
Entities
People
- Frank Barrett
- Mark Nissen
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School