Organizational Change in the Information Age

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Organizational change
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The growth of technology and media has affected organizations in diverse sectors. It has
transformed the way of doing business and the type of the offered products and services. The
changing economic landscape has resulted in organizations that have evolved as corporate
islands and involved in complex supply chains. The networked organizations involved
collaborative production and diversity of skills. For example, small business and self-employed
provide specialist input in larger corporations. The organization's reliance on technology is used
as a source for creating competitive advantage in different sectors. This represents the
contemporary networked organizations that exploded all over the globe. The traditional
organization used to be large, hierarchical, inflexible, process-based and moving business
slowly. The evolving nature of organizations as a result of the changing economy has affected
the nature of work and workers as well. Organizations are becoming flat and agile staffed by
workers who are more independent, task-oriented, have increasing work control systems and less
driven by the hierarchy. The traditional relationship of the employer-employee is also evolving,
it could be described by agility, as it involves mobility of workers away from the office and
within the office, as employees share resources and space (Harris, 2016; Gil-Garcia, Pardo, &
Sayogo, 2016).
The inter-organizational collaboration is facilitated by IT, interactions take place through
the digital platforms that enable information sharing. These interactions take place in a virtual
realm as well as in the physical world. In addition, they could take the form of textual
expressions that could be analyzed with social network tools as they represent social relations
rather than the relation of cultural ideational relation to reveal the importance of shaping ideas by
the social structure (Ferguson, Groenewegen, Moser, Borgatti, & Mohr, 2017). Castells (2010),
has discussed the changing nature of organizations upon behaviors, policies, and practices

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associated with the organizational structure, culture, and control. His arguments are discussed in
the following section, then the cultural implications built on these thoughts are to be analyzed.
According to Castells (2010), the rise up of the technological revolution arranged around
the information technology has reshaped the society. Economies around the world have become
globally interdependent representing a new type of relationship between the economy and
society. The organizations today depend on their capacity to generate, process and adopt
knowledge-based information. They operate globally because their core activities represented in
production and consumption are directly organized on a global scale of business or through a
network that take place among the economic agents. These organizations are networked as the
competition takes place globally. There is a relationship between technology advance and
organizational change. Technology has an impact on the organizational structure which affects
the productivity. Higher productivity levels that have resulted from the use of technology are due
to the employment of the customer-focused business strategy and the flat organizational structure
that rejects the vertical organizational structure and eliminates bureaucracy. These organizations
conduct organizational changes, provided training to the employees, extensively use IT and
encouraged organizational learning.
In addition, Castells (2010), noted that here are different types of organizational
transformation in the informational economy era. The network of subcontracting linked with
large organizations represents a trend that differs from the horizontal networks of the small and
medium organizations. Also, the web-like organizational structure that results from the strategic
agreements that take place between large organizations is different from the other types. All of
these trends are different from the vertical and bureaucratic large organizations involved in the
process of standardization and mass production. The major organizational changes that took

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place over more than the last two decades are not the newest or the best way of production, but
they represent the organizational change from the crisis of the vertical organization and the
oligopolistic control over markets. Different models have emerged as a result of this crisis, these
models represent the new forms of organizations that emerged due to the informational economy
that is mainly based on networks. The new network organizations are capable of expanding all
over the global economy as they are heavily reliant on the information provided through
technology.
According to Castells (2010), the assumptions of Cisco business model are as follows:
 The relationships that the organization establishes with its main constituencies can be a
source of competitiveness.
 Information sharing pattern with constituencies decides the strength of this relationship.
 The business relationships and organizational communications take the shape of the network
that assists in opening the organizational information to its main constituencies in a manner
that leverages the competitive advantage of the network.
Cisco Systems is a highly reputed company in the internet service industry, it has
dramatically expanded its business. This expansion encouraged it to apply the networking logic it
used to sell to its customers on itself. It has organized all of its relationships with the customers,
partners, suppliers, employees, engineering, design and software. The core of Cisco Systems
operations was its website, customers can find their needs of product lines through it.
Cisco Systems represents the IT revolution based on organizational networking and energized by
the information networks. This system is the best model of the networking organization that
could be applied to other sectors, not only to the internet economy or the information technology
industry. It has rapidly expanded to other industries as the agricultural machinery sector, grocery