1- Describe an organization, which has networking or connectivity problems 2- Wh
ID: 3828534 • Letter: 1
Question
1- Describe an organization, which has networking or connectivity problems
2- What connectivity problems is the organization facing Is the organization facing any security issues
3- How are the connectivity and security problems affecting the organization
4- What measures would you take to make the organization more secure and improve connectivity
5- What would be the cost to improve the connectivity and security system of the organization?
6- Discuss your solution and put your answer (minimum 200 words)
Explanation / Answer
The knowledge economy operates on the complexities of connections. All individuals, communities, systems, and other business assets are massively interconnected in an evolving economic ecosystem. In the connected economy, each network actor (individual, team, or organization) is embedded in a larger economic web that affects each participant and, in return, is influenced by that participant. In such a connected system we can no longer focus on the performance of individual actors we must manage connected assets. Efforts at making sense of this new world are beginning to reveal some basic principles at work in the complex adaptive systems we call our organizations. The company responded in part by reorganizing its work space, creating an office-free “village” where designers and architects could mingle and collaborate and customers could visit easily. Proximity does matter for promoting collaboration, and the space was conceptually compelling and visually appealing. Yet it failed to spark meaningful innovation or closer relationships with customers. Four and a half years after the building opened, management decided to revamp the work space again. This experience should be familiar to many businesses that respond to organizational dysfunction without fully thinking through its causes. An organization plagued by sluggish decision making might decide that decentralization is the remedy. A company suffering from poor communication, inflexibility, or an inability to pull together product offerings and expertise might try breaking down barriers that make functions or business units operate as silos. Yet as sensible as such interventions look on paper, they often yield disappointing results, so reorganizations, like rites of spring, come and go with surprising regularity, often without significantly boosting organizational effectiveness. A key part of the problem is that the boxes and lines of formal organizational charts mask myriad relationships in networks that crisscross the borders of functions, hierarchies, and business units. These networks define the way work actually gets done in today’s increasingly collaborative, knowledge-intensive companies. Little wonder that total-quality-management projects and the reengineering of business processes—to take just two examples of organizational-change efforts that largely ignore these essential but invisible networks—fail at least two-thirds of the time. In our experience, companies that invest time and energy to understand their networks and collaborative relationships greatly improve their chances of making successful organizational changes. Sophisticated approaches can map networks and identify the key points of connectivity where value is created or destroyed. A network approach can help companies to make change stick by working through influential employees, to focus on points in the network where relationships should be expanded or reduced, and to measure the effectiveness of major initiatives. Before the office products company undertook the second overhaul of its work space, it conducted a network analysis that revealed a sparse and fragmented set of relationships, a surprising number of interactions based solely on reporting structures, a great deal of one-way communication, and employees who were completely isolated from the group that worked in the open area. In response, the company reevaluated who should “reside” in the officeless village, giving priority to employees who were both working on high-end, strategic projects and had knowledge that others found valuable. Especially important were “brokers,” who interacted frequently with external consultants, designers, and academics and then funneled information from them to internal teams. Brokers who serve as bridges across a number of subgroups within networks are often quite influential.2 “Bridging” relationships uniquely position brokers to knit together an entire network and often make these interactions the most efficient means of gathering and disseminating information in a high-touch way. Brokers also tend to have the best perspective on what aspects of a reorganization will work across different subgroups and a high degree of ground-level credibility with people from disparate functions, locations, or occupations. What’s more, if management can persuade brokers to be early adopters and proponents of change, it can significantly boost the odds that a big transformational effort—involving a major cultural shift, postmerger integration, or the implementation of new technology will succeed. In our experience, it’s all too easy for a company to overlook its brokers because they tend to occupy the “white space” of an organization, and the sheer number of relationships they have may be small compared with those of other influential “connectors” to whom people frequently turn for information. In mergers, for example, companies often don’t know about brokers or they underestimate brokers’ potential importance to the merged entity. Recently, when a large pharmaceutical company undertook a friendly merger that required it to relocate 80 percent of its scientists, it carefully considered the knowledge it might lose from departures. Ultimately, it concluded that redistributing tasks among other employees or hiring new personnel could compensate for attrition. What the company failed to anticipate was the critical importance to the drug-development process of a few key scientists’ relationships with outside academics. Following the departure of two of the most richly connected scientists, these relationships deteriorated, and the merged entity’s innovation rate per scientist dropped significantly below each company’s premerger levels.
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