The Outsourcing Dilemma - The Search for Competitiveness.pdf

changing times in commerce 5
Only on very rare occasions did anyone seriously challenge this type of structure.
Those that did were mainly academics and their arguments largely failed because they
could not come up with suitable alternatives. The perceived business wisdom, therefore,
was that an ideal method of managing an organization had developed over many years
and it had been tried and tested – so it had to be right. Given these circumstances it was
normal for changes to be made to one function in isolation from other parts of the organization.
Even when management consultants were brought in to try to improve
performance they often looked for savings from the relevant function without considering
the full impact elsewhere in the organization. Organizations were thus guilty of
looking in on themselves and to some extent ignoring the accelerating change that was
affecting their marketplace and individual customers.
During the 1990s all this began to change. The competitive pressure became so strong
that the continued existence of everything and everyone in business was soon being challenged.
Technology developments changed some processes, made others obsolete and
effectively moved some from one function to another, e.g. from finance to IT. The management
theorists began to argue that the time had come to knock down the hierarchical walls
and create a flatter, more competitive management structure by getting rid of middle management.
Over the last few years management structures have got notably flatter in many
organizations, with many of the redundant middle managers being used in new, often technical
specialist, roles that reflect the organizations’ changing circumstances.
Heads of functions dealing with these changes were therefore under pressure from an
unprecedented number of directions. Apart from the usual problems of maintaining the
quality of their service, they had to contend with the threat to their empires and cope
with naturally concerned subordinates.
A number of factors were responsible for creating this situation. These included the globalization
of commerce, benchmarking, dramatically improved communications, as well as a
range of other technology developments, which frequently
emerged as packaged software.
Taken all together, these changes and threats add up to
in future each
one conclusion – in future each manager’s main responsibility
is to achieve and maintain the competitiveness of the responsibility is to
manager’s main
processes that are under his or her control. Obviously, achieve and maintain
competitive pressure has always existed for the majority of the competitiveness
organizations but in the 1990s it took on a new momentum
and meaning, simply because its importance was
of the processes that
are under his or
becoming more obvious.
her control
The importance of the competitive issue is illustrated by
the fact that a significant proportion of the articles and books
currently being printed on business subjects, concentrate in
some way or other, on the problem of how to be competitive and remain competitive.