From Bureaucracy to Enterprise? The Changing Jobs and Careers of Managers in Telecommunications Service

This paper analyzes how organizational restructuring is affecting managerial labor markets. Drawing on field research from several Bell operating companies plus a detailed survey of managers in one company, this paper considers how organizational restructuring affects the employment levels, the nature of work, and the career trajectories of lower and middle level line managers. Does restructuring lead to a loss or managerial power and a convergence in the working conditions of managerial and nonmanagerial workers? Or, conversely, do managers stand to gain from the flattening of hierarchies and devolution of decision-making to lower organizational levels? The paper\u27s central argument is that a new vision of organization has taken hold – one that replaces bureaucracy with enterprise. This vision, however, entails sharp contradictions because it relies on two competing approaches to organizational reform: one that relies on decentralizing management to lower levels to enhance customer responsiveness; the other that relies on reengineering and downsizing to realize scale economies. While the first approach views lower and middle managers as central to competitiveness, the second views them as indirect costs to be minimized. The central question is whether or how the two approaches can be reconciled. The evidence from this case study shows that restructuring has had the unintended consequence of creating new organizational cleavages: between lower and middle level managers on the one hand, and top managers on the other

Grid desktop computing for constructive battlefield simulation

It is a fact that gaming technology is a state-of-the-art tool for military training, not only in low level simulations, e.g. flight training simulations, but also for strategic and tactical training. It is also a fact that users of this kind of technologies require increasingly more realistic representations of the real world. This functional reality threatens both hardware and software capabilities, making almost impossible to keep up with the requirements. Many optimizations have been performed over simulation algorithms in order to fulfill these needs; no definitive solution, however, has yet been achieved. The question that arises naturally is, then: Does any generic global solution to the problem of the uneven growth of the computational power requirements with respect to the available capacities exist? This paper presents the problem by describing a real situation, analyzing the Batalla Virtual3 case of study and, in answering the motivating question, it proposes a potential software architecture employing a grid desktop computing (GDC) framework to empower constructive simulation systems, pulling off an adaptive hardware infrastructure. Additionally, as the constructive simulation scenarios do not fully adapt to the market-available GDC frameworks, the solution recommends suitable modifications to these software.Presentado en el IX Workshop Procesamiento Distribuido y Paralelo (WPDP)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Business process modelling: potential benefits and obstacles for wider use

As Organisations need to adapt to new business conditions and respond to competitive pressures, various change management approaches have been developed. Many studies suggest that the success of business change projects could be increased by developing dynamic models of business processes prior to their radical change. This paper investigates a potential of simulation modelling to be used for modelling business processes and argues the case for a wider use of simulation techniques by business community. It is postulated that discrete-event simulation can be considered as a missing link between change management approaches such as Just in Time [JIT], Total Quality Management [TQM] or business process re-engineering [BPR]. The usability of simulation modelling for evaluating alternative business process strategies is investigated, and the guidelines for achieving more widespread use of business process simulation are proposed

Reverse Engineering of Computer-Based Navy Systems

The financial pressure to meet the need for change in computer-based systems through evolution rather than through revolution has spawned the discipline of reengineering. One driving factor of reengineering is that it is increasingly becoming the case that enhanced requirements placed on computer-based systems are overstressing the processing resources of the systems. Thus, the distribution of processing load over highly parallel and distributed hardware architectures has become part of the reengineering process for computer-based Navy systems. This paper presents an intermediate representation (IR) for capturing features of computer-based systems to enable reengineering for concurrency. A novel feature of the IR is that it incorporates the mission critical software architecture, a view that enables information to be captured at five levels of granularity: the element/program level, the task level, the module/class/package level, the method/procedure level, and the statement/instruction level. An approach to reverse engineering is presented, in which the IR is captured, and is analyzed to identify potential concurrency. Thus, the paper defines concurrency metrics to guide the reengineering tasks of identifying, enhancing, and assessing concurrency, and for performing partitioning and assignment. Concurrency metrics are defined at several tiers of the mission critical software architecture. In addition to contributing an approach to reverse engineering for computer-based systems, the paper also discusses a reverse engineering analysis toolset that constructs and displays the IR and the concurrency metrics for Ada programs. Additionally, the paper contains a discussion of the context of our reengineering efforts within the United States Navy, by describing two reengineering projects focused on sussystems of the AEGIS Weapon System