The Paradigm Shift - from Function in traditional organizations to Process in Extended new organizational scheme

Globalization, improvement in communications and the universal availability of mobile devices have boosted a dramatic paradigm shift on the way organizations are acting and on the IT architecture that has to support their operations. 

This change is summarized in the following diagram where we represent the evolution form the traditional pyramidal organization based on the Function assigned to each person to a new extended concept of the organizations where each person is acting in different processes with different roles.

 

In the new extended organization paradigm, internal applications are interconnected with external ones belonging to suppliers, clients and services outsourcing companies; communications are essentially structured and internal and external users are interchanging data and contents in real time from everywhere and being all this constant traffic governed by BPM processes.

The reason for that is clear: the actors in an organization and their behavior has completely changed to an opposite situation as is summarized in the following table:

 

This new paradigm has a big impact on the IT concept and architecture passing from having its focus on assuring the log of transactions to a new main mission consistent on supporting the automation of the procedures; or, in other words, passing from a very “solid” imperative way to manage the organization to a collaborative model that we could qualify like “liquid” or even “gaseous”.