Redefining organizational boundaries : building an aware and agile organization by enabling new social interactions

Today's world is characterized by great turbulence and uncertainty. Rapid and discontinuous changes in technologies, regulation, competition, and demand are increasingly becoming the rule. Information is rapidly rendered inaccurate or obsolete by new information, and strategic opportunities arise and disappear quickly. The complexity of the external environment, and the associated unpredictability, place a premium on fast decision making and organizational flexibility to adapt quickly. Policymakers as well as business decision makers are struggling to keep pace with these new challenges. As the scientific and mechanical view of the world is not appropriate for such complex environments, new methods are required. To this end, we explore emerging fields, such as complexity theory and complex adaptive systems, to offer new approaches to address the fundamental dilemma of flexibility versus efficiency. Furthermore, we argue that policymakers can learn from the private sector and leverage new management concepts to become more effective. A key lesson is that organizations need to tap the passion and spirit of their employees. Clearly, technology will play a central role in redefining decision and policy making. We discuss how new web based social technologies will revolutionize organizations and enable new ways to channel collective intelligence of its employees. Such technologies have virtually eliminated transaction costs and made group forming easy and costless. We propose a framework to leverage the power of new social technologies.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Maupetit, Benjamin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mahender Singh.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/52754

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/52754