Senior officers in a national military organization decided that operations in supplies requisition were inefficient and costly. They brought in consultants who recommended that the entire requisition process be "reengineered." This involved throwing out the old practices and developing an entirely new set of work activities around workflow. However, like many reengineering changes, this intervention resulted in lower productivity, higher employee turnover, and other adverse outcomes. Discuss likely problems in the context of the open systems perspective.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The open systems perspective views organizations as complex organisms that "live" within an external environment. There are three possible ways that systems theory explains these problems. First is the fact that as open systems, organizations depend on the external environment for resources, including raw materials, job applicants, financial resources, information, and equipment. In this case, reengineering the supplies requisition may have created resource requirements that are unavailable or difficult to obtain.

The second and more likely of these is the fact that open systems have subsystems that are dependent on each other. In this situation, reengineering the supplies requisition process may have disrupted other parts of the organization, which, in turn, undermined the supplies group's ability to complete their work. The point here is that open systems consist of subsystems that are dependent on each other, and it is always useful to ensure that changes in one part of the organization have minimal adverse effects on other parts of the organization.

The third possible (but less likely) problem is in terms of inputs, transformation, outputs, and feedback. The reengineering process may have thrown out a functioning transformation process.

The change could also have resulted in less feedback from the environment regarding how well the organization is interacting with the environment. Perhaps the change resulted in a disruption of inputs or side effects in the outputs.

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