How should organizations dealing with the new technologies be structured? To find out, let's look at what makes the new technologies different and see if there were earlier organizations that existed before the new technologies and had to face similiar organizational problems.
Companies in the data processing industry can seem to function successfully in many different size ranges. IBM is one of the largest organizations in the world with 200,000 employees. Beehive and Novell have functioned nicely with 200 employees, and Foxware Inc., a software developer, has functioned quite successfully with only 2. This is possible because the industry is quite complex and dynamic. The different sizes are performing different functions.
The smallest companies are those that use personal knowledge the most. They are the pioneer development companies, software developers, and consultants. They are characterized by high risk, low capital requirements, low overhead, high information content, and a very specialized nature. Unless they are marketing companies, such as distributors, they do very little marketing. Little companies are very effective at designing and developing very new products. They are the most innovative of companies, and the most flexible.
Medium-size companies are good manufacturers. They are big enough to set up efficient distribution and accounting arms. They are good at reengineering, and they are good at developing support documentation, technical support, and training for single function products.
The big companies have marketing clout to separate them from medium companies. They also have the ability to market, distribute, and support complex systems such as whole computer systems. Their strength is the ability to send in specialists on each area of the system at one call--there should be no problems with jurisdiction. There should also be little question of whether or not they will be there in the future--the risk is lower of company failure or of the company being so flexible that it "flexes" its way out of product support.
[[[ 7 - Little, Medium, and Big ]]]
There are exceptions to these generalizations, but they should be recognized as that. For instance, a medium-size company that is supporting complex computer systems is not stable. It needs to either grow rapidly or find a simpler product line quickly.
Electronics and software are distinctive from other new technologies in a special way. They are "safe" products. It's hard for an experimenter to get hurt miswiring an IC chip or popping too many variables off a stack. They are inexpensive avocations to invest in, and avocations where time can be substituted effectively for other expensive resources, and still produce commercially significant results.
Because of this, electronics and software enthusiasts can start their apprenticeship on the "real thing" almost as soon as they can walk--certainly by high school. Compare that to working with carcinogens, prosthetics, glass ovens, nuclear power, or most other industrial processes where the apprenticeship begins in college at the earliest, more typically not until the practitioner actually reaches industry. This means that electronics and software people can be quite young and quite experienced at the same time--they bring early fruits to the industry. It also means that the most precocious young inventors are attracted early-on to these industries; other industries must pay more and settle for the more patient types or those with a vested interest in the industry, such as family in the business.
By the same token, as long as electronics remain an "easy" industry, we can expect to see it remain in the forefront of advancing technologies. The electronics revolution as we have experienced it will end when a person in his garage can no longer produce meaningful products with breadboards, PC's, and their future equivalents. Conversely, this may never happen. Instead, the electronics revolution instead may be joined by others.
Thanks to advances in electronics, CAD/CAM, and robotics, it may be that other technologies will become as easy to work with as electronics. We may see the day where prototyping shops (proto shops for short) become store front facilities operating much like the print shops or graphics shops of today do. You design something on a computer at home that uses the library of congress, the patent libraries, plus some others for a data base, then phone in or take a disk to the "proto-shop" for a small run of plastic parts, genetic components, or whatever.
[[[ 8 -- Inspriation, behind which door? ]]]
Most industries evolve in part by watching advances in related industries. For instance, the people making O-rings watch the backery industry for advances in material handling. The heart of both baked goods and O-rings are mixing and cooking; the techniques and tools are often interchangeable. Are there industries that the new technologies can look to for organizational inspiration?
New Technology tends to be very dynamic and project-oriented. The projects have distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. This makes them unlike many traditional big industries such as steel, chemical, or transportation that are highly process-oriented (their problems go on forever). These differences have posed problems to managers from the traditional industries. How do they manage these new technology parameters effectively?
The traditional solution to such a problem is to look for some other industry that is dealing with similar characteristics and copy their solutions. For instance, NASA projects tend to be project-oriented. Many of the companies emerging in the 50's and 60's--companies dealing with NASA--also had to deal with project-oriented problems. For them NASA was a better role model than the older, process-oriented steel, auto, or railroad companies--which partly explains the fascination in business circles with NASA project management techniques in the 60's and early '70's.
But the lessons to be learned were of limited use. NASA is a big organization, and (at least in it's early days of launching men to the moon) its major constraint was not money, but time--the primary goal was to win the space race and get Americans on the Moon before the cosmonauts arrived. Project Management and Matrix Organization were developed by NASA as ways to get the things required to reach this goal done quickly. These organizational structures, by the way, have their roots in earlier history--they were used in the military during the French and Russian Revolutions when political advisers were put in joint command of units along with regular military commanders. These organizational structures develop during times of crisis when it is important that goal-completion override constraints of efficiency or tradition.
These structures work well in crisis situations when there are clearly defined and pressing goals to be reached. But they are distracting and expensive to maintain in business-as-usual environments. The dual lines of authority that prove very useful when cutting through red-tape and arranging ad hoc coordination with other groups during solving an imminent crisis, become a source of friction and contention when the crisis is solved and procedures become routine. Dual lines of authority are a powerful agent for organizational change (especially cultural change); if they are used where change is not needed they become a source of friction.
So, who else can we look to for a role model? Who else deals with projects that have distinctive beginnings, middles, and ends? Who else uses expert craftsmen? Who else deals in projects that are small or medium in size? These are the people to look to for inspiration.
One group I would propose to look at for a role model are movie makers. The people working in this industry are highly project-oriented; the tasks are accomplished by specialized, skilled people; they experience rapid technological turnover.
In movie making a producer and director pull together a team of specialists for a project with a clearly defined goal and a task of limited duration, and they have had years of experience with sub-contracting tasks. Perhaps the kinds of organizations used by movie makers would prove useful for solving some of the problems associated with today's electronics?
Is it possible to pull together a team of engineering, marketing, and support specialists for an computer project? Yes, its done even today in the form of temporaries. Teams of temporaries are brought in by some companies to support a core of permanent people while a project is being developed. Once the project is finished the temporaries leave and the permanent people continue the support work. Is there more to learn from the movie makers about how to organize, motivate, or finance these kinds of people?
Companies that require a lot of inter-personal communications should be small companies. Typically these are knowledge-intensive companies like software R&D companies, engineering companies, and research groups. Organizations where there has to be a lot of close cooperation on non-routine matters. Typically these groups can function with one to twenty people involved.
Companies that sell to and support end-users of complex systems need to be big. The marketing companies should be handling the polishing of ideas developed by small companies, developing the support documentation, and handling the training. These are 1000 to 50,000 plus people organizations. They use knowledge, but they handle it in more routine ways so economies of scale can be applied. They are big because they are few and far between, and because their size brings a lot of resource to the complex problems of getting product distributed and accepted by end-users.
Manufacturing sits in between marketing and developing in size. Manufacturing companies in electronics seems to do well with 50-400 people involved. They need to be big enough to gain purchasing economies and manufacturing expertise, but they don't need to carry the training, promotion, and distribution overheads that marketers do.