Week 2: Information Handling, Organizational Structure and Power

While the first Buckland paper was useful and inspired much thought, this paper "Information Handling, Organizational Structure and Power" seems to be more applicable to real life situations. Buckland's thesis sentence of this paper is, "Improved information handling can be expected to centralize power."

I have been involved with many organizations throughout my life. My position in most of these organizations has been very near the bottom of the decision making tree, and I never thought about all the organization that was required above me to make things run smoothly. Recently, while looking for jobs and through a few different interviews, I have been exposed to the reality that successful organizations have a strict, well defined structure for decision making and information sharing. I interviewed at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and in both the phone and in-person interview the company's structure was outlined to me. I took their focus on structure to be evidence of the importance of that structure in the organization. The importance BCBSNC, as well as other companies, places on organization give Buckland's paper importance.

Nearly all of his points in this paper are well argued and articulated, notably his discussion on delegation of decision making. He says that decision making with be more spread out in an organization if it has poor communication methods. Poor communication could be a result of poor technology which prohibits communication which would have normally taken place or perhaps if interpersonal communication is poor. Either way it makes it very difficult or in some cases impossible for a centralized power to make all the decisions.

This paper was written in 1987 and Buckland makes the point that technical improvement in communication should lead to reduced delegation. I wonder what he would say about the Blackberry phenomenon. Blackberrys and similar devices allow people within organizations to instantly be aware of recent developments and give them the opportunity to reply to these developments instantly. However, in large companies it is not like the only person to have access to this technology is the CEO or other board members. In many cases, everyone in the company has access to all of this knowledge. Since everyone is capable of receiving the new information, each is able to respond to it within their own role. In this way, delegation is preserved and strengthened. New technology may make it easier for important decisions to be made by those with authority but it also makes it easier for lower level decision to be made by lower level people.

One other point of this paper I found very interesting was Buckland's assertion that, "Independence is an aspect of power." He made this point in reference to officers in the military being made redundant because of technological advances. I agree with this point entirely. However, in his example the organization as a whole suffered after the redundant officers removed the technology which made them redundant. To me that is wasting resources. If there a way to save time and money the organization should go for it and its members need to keep up. As things become more automated it will be interesting to see how organizations deal with redundant members.

Finally this comes straight from Buckland's paper. These are his assertions from his research into this subject. I am including them because they are very good assertions.

1. The centralization of decision-making is directly related to the effectiveness of information handling;
   
2. The greater the difficulties of information handling, the more layers of hierarchy;
   
3. More generally, the delegation of decision-making is inversely related to the effectiveness of information handling;
   
4. Technical improvement in information handling will tend to result in centralization of power; and as corollaries:
   
5. The effective centralization of power is indicative of effective information handling; and, therefore,
   
6. More effective centralization can be viewed as a measure of technical improvement in information systems.