Alcoa Aluminum's Workplace Structure
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In 1996, Alcoa Aluminum began to experiment with radical changing of workplace dynamics. After having downsized, re-engineered, customer-focused, dissolved structure, reorganized work teams, and everything else then current management ôwisdomö suggested to make them more responsive, competitive, and nimble, they realized they were still not achieving the desired results. What they found instead was that they were running into walls because the emerging work styles which began to become apparent in the early to middle part of the decade of the 1990s, were no longer working in a corporate headquarters facility that had been designed to accommodate the old ôtop-downö hierarchical structure of corporate society in the United States. Hence, the ôoffice of the futureö began to formulate, although it is not attributed to Alcoa. From Manhattan to Silicon Valley, businesses of all sizes began to embrace the new office designs of the 21rst century. Privacy began to be replaced by productivity, hierarchy with teamwork, and status with mobility (Hamilton, et al, 1996). Being able to work anywhere and anytime became the new paradigm. Theoretically, with this model, one could be productive working from the car, from home, the ôoffice,ö virtually any place where one would have access to a telephone line. In short, the new paradigm represents a massive disaggregation of work taking place inside as well as outside of the walls of the traditional office environment.
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rmation of business and jobs has created the basis for re-integrating the individual into a highly productive, more egalitarian social order (Shank, 1992). When it is no longer possible to assume that any training will remain valid for very long, the origin of oneÆs knowledge becomes less important the way in which it is cultivated (Bessler, 1997). Therefore, in order to understand where technology is leading, the organization must first have the ability to understand developments and their implications both from a technological as well as from a sociological perspective. Additionally, the organization must also be able to recognize and implement change rapidly and with as little disruption to the culture of the organization as possible. Key to all of this is the role of Information Technology.
Contrary to popular belief, it has never been that difficult to predict the direction of technology, especially as it pertains to computers. Things like processing power and data storage elements have advanced quickly, often by orders of magnitude, but not in any really surprising fashion. Cost and physical size have continued to move inversely to the direction of technological performance.
What has been difficult is being able to
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Approximate Word count = 2150
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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