From Bureaucracy to Hyperarchy in Netcentric and Quick Learning Organizations

This book focuses on the inherent contradiction between bureaucracy, hierarchy, and the vision inspired by the architecture ofmodern information technology of a more egalitarian culture in public organizations. We agree with Evans and Wurster andothers who have argued that, in the future, knowledge-based productive relationships will be designed around fluid, teambasedcollaborative communities, either within organizations (i.e., deconstructed value chains), or in collaborative alliancessuch as those with amorphous and permeable corporate boundaries characteristic of companies in the Silicon Valley that is,deconstructed supply chains. In such relationships everyone can communicate richly with everyone else on the basis of sharedstandards and, like the Internet itself, these relationships will eliminate the need to channel information, thereby eliminatingthe trade-off between information bandwidth and connectivity. The possibility (or the threat) of random access and informationsymmetry, they conclude, will destroy all hierarchies, whether of logic or power