From Bureaucracy to Hyperarchy in Netcentric and Quick Learning Organizations

Book excerpt: This book focuses on the inherent contradiction between bureaucracy, hierarchy, and the vision inspired by the architecture of modern information technology of a more egalitarian culture in public organizations. We agree with Evans and Wurster and others who have argued that, in the future, knowledge-based productive relationships will be designed around fluid, teambased collaborative communities, either within organizations (i.e., deconstructed value chains), or in collaborative alliances such as those with "amorphous and permeable corporate boundaries characteristic of companies in the Silicon Valley" that is, deconstructed supply chains. In such relationships everyone can communicate richly with everyone else on the basis of shared standards and, like the Internet itself, these relationships will eliminate the need to channel information, thereby eliminating the trade-off between information bandwidth and connectivity. "The possibility (or the threat) of random access and information symmetry," they conclude, "will destroy all hierarchies, whether of logic or power."