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The rhyme we all learned as children rings in my ears: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. I like to use Humpty Dumpty to describe companies that have functionally separated their work. These companies group similar tasks together, which shatters any cohesive workflow. For service industries especially, this can be extremely counterproductive.
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My British colleagues describe this as “functional specialisms.” I call it the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome. Regardless, the functional separation of work has long penetrated the design of most organizations. Functional separation is in our DNA. Frederick Winslow Taylor and proponents of scientific management introduced this design of breaking work into functions and optimizing the pieces. Scientific management theory was a breakthrough—100 years ago. A century later our work structures are still designed in the same way except that modern organizations grapple with information technology (IT) more often than physical layout.
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Systems cannot be understood by analysis
As Dr. Russell L. Ackoff put it: It isn't the actions of the parts, but their interactions that matter. But, that has been a very difficult lesson to learn as we're not designed to think in terms of interactions (non-linear). We seem to be naturally wired for and then systematically programmed to think linearly using analytical techniques.
(Shrikant Kalegaonkar, twitter: @shrikale, LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shrikale/)
Outsourcing function has
Outsourcing function has emerged to bring in more specialization of functions in the organization.
It aims to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
Organizational thus thins out and it reduces the management layers.
This has evolved as contemporary successful model that helps management in focusing the core functions and specialized segments.
Once the outsourcing is done, processes should be re-engineered to support the new business model as well IT systems should be upgraded with sufficient previliges to the customer support empowering them to resolve issues and problems.
May be processes re-engineering and ITIL should be the focus instead of status quo and reverting back to the functional design.
I suggest that we really need data to support the premise that this is sub-optimization.
Outsourcing
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