The Internet and Imperatives for New Forms of Organizations

The role of information technology (IT) in shaping tomorrow’s operations is a distinctive one. The Internet is a pervasive phenomenon and it is commonly believed that the Internet and its inherent distributed capabilities lead to decentralized views. They have had profound effects on organizational structure, because organizations can gain enormous location flexibility in various activities. While the Internet has overcome distance and organizations they now have to deal with different combinations of physical and electronic spaces and places. The challenge for companies in information markets is the shift from physical to electronic infrastructures.  Many researchers believe that current models of organizational structure fail to meet the challenges of the information age. Researchers believe that the traditional hierarchy has outlived its usefulness and that new organizational models are needed and that IT lies at the heart of these new models for next century. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Internet impacts on organizational structures and identify imperatives for new emerging forms of organizations in the light of IT advances

A Contingency Framework of the Relationship Between the Use of it and Organizational Design Variables (Fit as Gestalts Perspective)

Despite the fact that IT has become a fundamental variable for organizational design very few studies have been done to explore this vital issue in a systematic and convincing fashion. Indeed, the small amount of information and few theories available on organizational design in general and much less on the effects of IT on organization design is surprising. Most studies on the effects of IT on organizational design describe IT in general ways which have led to a non-generalizable and even contradictory result. The divergence in findings of previous research to some extent arises partly from lack of systematic approach to evaluate all the variables affecting organizational design. The current research attempts to address this problem by developing a contingency framework within which the impact of information technology (IT) on organizational design variables and simultaneously a number of the variables of interest and their relationship together are explored. To pursuit its objectives, in the first step, direct effects of IT on four organizational design variables (decision making, control, positions and formalisation) will be examined. Second, in addition to evaluating direct effects of IT, based on a conceptual theory in framework of FIT as gestalts approach, we also viewed this relationship from a contingency theory perspective at three levels organizational, individual and technological.  In order to obtain rich data to explain the processes of change, while still being able to quantitatively measure and statistically analyze the impacts of advanced technologies on organizational design, a survey instrument will be utilized with target population of 400 Iranian manufacturing companies

Hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms for a supply chain network considering different carbon emission regulations using big data characteristics

Big data (BD) approach has significantly impacted on the development and expansion of supply chain network management and design. The available problems in the supply chain network (SCN) include production, distribution, transportation, ordering, and inventory holding problems. These problems under the BD environment are challenging and considerably affect the efficiency of the SCN. The drastic environmental and regulatory changes around the world and the rising concerns about carbon emissions have increased the awareness of customers regarding the carbon footprint of the products they are consuming. This has enforced supply chain managers to change strategies to reframe carbon emissions. The decisions such as an optimization of the suitable network of the proper lot sizes can play a crucial role in minimizing the whole carbon emissions in the SCN. In this paper, a new integrated production–transportation–ordering–inventory holding problem for SCN is developed. In this regard, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model in the multi-product, multi-level, and multi-period SCN is formulated based on the minimization of the total costs and the related cost of carbon emissions. The research also uses a chance-constrained programming approach. The proposed model needs a range of real-time parameters from capacities, carbon caps, and costs. These parameters along with the various sizes of BD, namely velocity, variety, and volume, have been illustrated. A lot-sizing policy along with carbon emissions is also provided in the proposed model. One of the important contributions of this paper is the three various carbon regulation policies that include carbon capacity-and-trade, the strict capacity on emission, and the carbon tax on emissions in order to assess the carbon emissions. As there is no benchmark available in the literature, this study contributes toward this aspect by proposing two hybrid novel meta-heuristics (H-1) and (H-2) to optimize the large-scale problems with the complex structure containing BD. Hence, a generated random dataset possessing the necessary parameters of BD, namely velocity, variety, and volume, is provided to validate and solve the suggested model. The parameters of the proposed algorithms are calibrated and controlled using the Taguchi approach. In order to evaluate hybrid algorithms and find optimal solutions, the study uses 15 randomly generated data examples having necessary features of BD and T test significance. Finally, the effectiveness and performance of the presented model are analyzed by a set of sensitivity analyses. The outcome of our study shows that H-2 is of higher efficiency