Organizational Simulation and Information Systems Design: An Operations Level Example

Arundhati Kumar, Peng Si Ow and Michael J. Prietula
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Arundhati Kumar: Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213
Peng Si Ow: IBM, Entry Systems Division, MC 1335, Austin, Texas 78758
Michael J. Prietula: Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Management Science, 1993, vol. 39, issue 2, 218-240

Abstract: The interplay between organizational structure, the decisions made by agents within the structure, and the technology supporting those agents is an important and complex, but not well understood, phenomenon in modern organizational studies. In this paper we describe how simulating key aspects of an organization's structure, in this case a hospital, can yield insights into the design of information systems and their performance. In particular, we report on a project that simulates alternative distributed decision-making approaches for patient scheduling tasks. The results indicate that there are important and complicated interactions between the alternative organizational structures simulated, the form of the information systems supporting those structures, and the task environment. This suggests that current, universal, a priori assumptions about the interplay between technology and organizational structure are questionable. Furthermore, organization-specific simulation is seen as a potentially useful method of explicating the important tradeoffs in alternative design possibilities.

Keywords: organizational structure; organizational design; simulation; scheduling; information systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993
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