Turning Bureaucracies into Process Networks

Even though the process approach to organization design gains increased popularity, there is still a lack of methodologies for managing the migration process from functional, hierarchical organizations to process networks. While current change management approaches, such as BPR, often emphasize an organizational redesign “from scratch”, i.e. a total disregard of the current structure, combined with the design of a new, idealized organization, many organizations have considered this radical restructuring as being inapplicable and require methodologies for managing a migration from bureaucratic structures to a dynamic, process based organizational form. This paper will discuss the challenge of turning bureaucracies into process networks, potential gains and pitfalls will be identified, and a methodology will be introduced. Introduction Many theorists, as well as practitioners, consider modern organizations, i.e. organizations based on the control paradigm of the industrial era, as being insufficient in a world of global markets, increasing competition and changing customer requirements. Change approaches such as reengineering, are a proposed solution to the problemacy of surviving in a dynamic world. Even though many companies are embarking on these trends due to threats imposed through environmental contingencies, the radicality of many of these approaches appears to be insufficient for managing the complexity of organizational transformation from a modern to a ”postmodern” form. This article is intended to propose an ”incremental” approach to organizational transformation, which will allow organizations to migrate from a bureaucratic to a processbased form without the disruptive disturbances evolving from a reengineering effort in its more radical form. I will present guidelines for choosing appropriate processes for incremental reengineering, present a methodology approach and stake out a way for changing the organizational steering paradigm from a simple collaborative to a cooperative way (as described by Kämmerer and Ljungberg (1994)), where management by control is replaced by symbolic management, i.e. commitment of the individuals being involved, rather than Turning Bureaucracies into Process Networks Kai Artur Simon 2 behavioral control by superior managers. Additionally, critical success factors for this process will be identified and the changing roles of organizational members will be briefly discussed. Finally I will briefly present a vision of an organization totally based upon processes and describe some of the implications of this perspective. The nature of bureaucracies Organization and operation Organizations, no matter if we talk about businesses, public institutions, or other forms of corporations, are no natural phenomena, but social constructions, i.e. they exist because their members perceive them to do so (Harrington 1991). They evolve as a result of a striving for some kind of order, i.e. they are the artificial result of human efforts to handle the severe issues of complexity and to implement an artificial order, where a natural one cannot be found. Regarding this social-constructionistic perspective, bureaucratic structures in businesses appear to be a way of providing mechanisms for dealing with the increasing need to handle the difficulties occuring as a result of the requirements to run the business with regard to environmental dynamics and the needs for coordination and cooperation of several functional activities. However, when looking at the outcome of these intentions, we can often observe, that the measures taken to struggle with increasing internal and external complexity are often only reflected by increasing internal complexity, i.e. more complex information flows through the organizational element of the company, while the operational flow, i.e. the way of the product, or service, remains rather unaffected. In order to describe this organizational duality, we can use the distinction between organization and operation, as described by Kosiol (1962). This distinction emphasizes a conception of organizations as having two aspects organization and operation where the operational part is the carrier of the product or service, while organization is the formal depictable structure describing the relationships of hierarchy and control. Even though Kosiol considered the two elements as not being clearly distinctable and the distinction itself as a scientific trick, aimed 1