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VIII Management Models
1. Malone, T.W. Modeling coordination in organizations and markets, Management Science, 33
(10), 1987, 1317–1332.
Abstract. This paper describes a simple set of coordination structures that model certain
kinds of information processing involved in organizations and markets. Four generic coordination
structures are defined: product hierarchies, functional hierarchies, centralized markets,
and decentralized markets. Then tradeoffs among these structures are analyzed in terms of
production costs, coordination costs, and vulnerability costs. This model is unusual in that it
includes detailed definitions of the structures at a micro-level and mathematical derivations of
comparisons among them at a macro-level. In the final section of the paper, several connections
are made between these formal results and previous work on organizational design.
Keywords: Organizational structure, Organization design, Coordination, Information processing
2. Andrews, Bruce H. and Henry L. Parsons. L.L. Bean chooses a telephone agent scheduling system,
Interfaces, 19 (6), 1989, 1–9.
Abstract. Concerns the development for mail order company L.L. Bean of a computerized
procedure for selecting complex large-scale telephone-operator scheduling systems. To assess
capability in forecasting work load, setting requisite capacity levels, and generating satisfactory
work-shift schedules, cost/benefit analysis was used and the expected penalty costs of lost orders
due to understaffing and loaded-wage costs of overstaffing were considered. Queuing theory was
used to model customer-call behavior for every hour over 24-hour days, seven days per week, and
the results of linear regression, which correlated customer-service level with expected customer
abandonment rate, were implemented to estimate the impact on order revenues of telephoneservice
level.
Keywords: Work load forecasting, Queueing theory, Telephone agent scheduling system, Mailorder
company, L.L. Bean, Computerized procedure, Complex large-scale telephone operator
scheduling systems, Capacity levels, Work shift schedules, Cost-benefit analysis, Expected
penalty costs, Understaffing, Loaded wage costs, Overstaffing, Linear regression
(Appears also in Section I.)
3. Adler, M. and E. Simoudis. Cooperation and coordination in help desk organizations. Proceedings
of the 11th International Workshop on DAI, Glen Arbor, MI, 1992.
Abstract. A help desk is an organization that consists of support engineers who provide “over
the phone” service support for a company’s products and services. The goal of the support
engineers is to cooperate in order to help the calling customer to recover from a failure or to
provide assistance by answering a customer’s request. Help desks are organized by the particular
product or service they support, or the product’s type. The support engineers for a particular
help desk are organized hierarchically, with novice engineers at the low levels of this hierarchy
and experts at the highest levels. The inter- and intra-structure of help desks and the interactions
between their staffers make them interesting from the Distributed AI (DAI) perspective. In
this paper we examine the structure of help desks in detail, describe where and how information
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