Supporting organizational relations through information technology in innovative organizational forms

The paper analyses some of the main organizational changes which have emerged in the last few years as an answer to the new economic environment calling for global, time-based competition: reduction of hierarchy levels, elimination of slack resources, enlargement of decisional autonomy of organizational units/offices and of lateral communication and coordination mechanisms. The paper affirms a new role of information technology (IT) connected to these organizational transformations. Three main areas for new IT support are recognised: (i) facilities for middle manager decisions; (ii) tools for improving the decisional autonomy of organizational units; and (iii) supports to lateral mechanisms of communication and coordination. For analysing and identifying these new areas of support, a new method of organizational analysis is proposed: the relational method of organizational analysis. This new multidimensional method and perspective overcomes difficulties deriving from the reductionism of the existing methods, looking only to the ‘economic’, ‘formal’ or ‘interpersonal’ components of the relation. Instead the proposed relational method is able to analyse simultaneously the several dimensions of a relation and to discover and to explain the new role of IT in innovative firms.