Organizational design issues

James Desveaux, University of California, Los Angeles You have outlined an impressive degree of innovation and adaptation. A question by another member of the audience has spawned curiosity for me about some organizational design issues, related to the different types of industrial partnerships permitted under the arrangements you described. What you have described sounds a lot like the kind of system that the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in Austin put in place a number of years ago. In fact, what you have discussed even bears some resemblance to partnership innovations recently made by the partners of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. Where did the ideas come from for the collaborative iimovations that you outlined Did you actively scan other models To what extent are these models rephcable ... 

As mentioned above, the need to adapt the use of the standard to each proj ect was emphasized by the majority of the interviewees. The main reason for this organizational project issue is was the processes described in the standard did not match the actual process standards. One interviewee stated that in his opinion it was a big drawback of the standard that it appeared to assume that all CC designs started from scratch. Another issue related to this was that decisions, e.g. deciding the number of operators, are expected to occur late in the ISO 11064 processes, while real oil and gas projects tend to make such decisions early in the projects to enable start of the facility construction. 

System reliability refers to the probability that a systan or process will consistently perform as designed. We can view reliability as opposite of a system s rate of error or failure. Many reliable systems will not work effectively unless accepted in an organizational culture that values teamwoik, communication, accountability, and learning from mistakes. Many improvement processes focus too much on operational effort expended instead of focusing on process or system design issues. Too much focus on individual outcomes can exaggerate overall reliability. Autonomy permits systems to have wide margins of performance (Table 1.26). 

Thus several of these researchers have begun to think about designing process-oriented healthcare information systems that adjust naturally to changes in resources and organizational structures. Computer-interpretable models based on clinical workflows have already been implemented within the context of specific different fields, such as stroke and cancer therapy. A snapshot of part of an automated laboratory workflow is in Table 7.1.2 These authors as well as others have considered special kinds of networks for healthcare workflow that issue simple reminders and serve as an organizer in a healthcare office environment in which duties are widely shared. 

While there are a number of positive elements associated with teamwork in general, there are also some potential negative elements. Furthermore, these elements are not constant but rather depend on the type of team as weU as the organizational environment in which teams operate. In the next section, we propose a typology of teams, review key characteristics of teams, and address the issue of designing teams. 

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