How Does Technology Affect Organisation Structure

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The impact of technology at the plant level is also significant. Technology & Organisation Structure: Technology has considerable influence on organisation structure, length of the line of command, & span of control of the chief executive. Where companies use technology, which is fast changing, matrix structures are more common. Some companies use a matrix even though the rate of technological change is not fast. Besides technology, other factors that have their influence on organisation structure are history and background of a company, the personalities of the people who founded the firm and managed it subsequently, but the impact of technology is considerable. Lines of command tend to be lengthy where the production is routine & process based. Decision-making is highly centralised. It tends to be short if the production activities are customised. The use of specialists will be more & hence decision- making gets delegated. In mass production technologies, the number of people whom an executive controls tends to be larger than when the production is unit based. Any technological advancement will result in:- a) The expanded…show more content…
Abandonment Phase: It is a very critical and last phase of the technology cycle because it deals with decisions regarding the obsolescence of a particular technology. New technologies are hitting the market at lightning speed so do the discarding of existing technologies is also faster which makes timing as a crucial factor for survival and winning in the business game. There are possibilities of suffering losses in revenues because of prematurely abandoning a product technology or waiting too long to abandon the existing technology and adopting a new technology because a customer can figure out a better alternatives in competition. So this abandonment decision is not so easy or based on any kind of mathematical formula but it is improved using more information from different areas of the company, such as R & D, marketing and
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