Changing Major Acquisition Organizations to Adopt the Best Loci of Knowledge, Responsibilities and Decision Rights

Abstract

The DoD is a large, bureaucratic, rule-intensive organization that may no longer be best suited for its new environment. Building upon prior, multidisciplinary research, we draw upon the best knowledge and practice in change management, and analyze transformation from the classic Hierarchy to the Edge-like Holonistic organization, which offers excellent potential for performance improvement. Such analysis focuses on the processes of change from one organizational form to another and leads to the generation of transformational plans, which can be used by acquisition leaders, practitioners and policy makers to outline steps and leaps required to affect fundamental organizational change. We also build upon prior work on computational modeling and experimentation to develop models of the transformation process, and we explore such models to emulate the behavior of the alternate transformational plans noted above. By modeling and experimenting with processes of change, as opposed to processes of ongoing organizational routines, we begin to extend the state-of-the-art in computational modeling and experimentation. Practically, answers to our research questions have direct and immediate application to acquisition leaders and policy makers. Theoretically, we generalize to broad classes of organizational transformations and prescribe a novel set of organizational redesign guides.