22 research outputs found
The transformation of bureaucracy? Structural change in the Commonwealth public service 1983-93
Commentators have predicted bureaucratic organisations would undergo substantial change as a result of social and economic pressures. We ask whether reforms to the Australian public service over the 1983–93 period exemplify this process. We use the methods of organisational analysis to characterise the direction of change, basing our assessment on the standard structural variables of complexity, formalisation and centralisation, together with a cultural variable. We find evidence that, overall, departments of state in the APS were becoming less bureaucratic in their structure, culture and internal function in the 1983–93 period. However, the effect was not uniform across departments, or unambiguous — formalisation, for example, increased in some respects and decreased in others. Centralisation increased overall, despite devolution of some decision-making
Forensic Emergency Medicine
AIAA SPACE 2007 Conference & Exposition
18-20 September 2007, Long Beach, California.Customers’ needs are dynamic and evolve in response to unfolding environmental uncertainties.
The ability of a company or an industry to address these changing customers’ needs in a timely and
cost-effective way is a measure of its responsiveness. In the space industry, a systemic discrepancy
exists between the time constants associated with the change of customers’ needs, and the response
time of the industry in delivering on-orbit solutions to these needs. Increasingly, the penalties
associated with such delays are becoming unacceptable, and space responsiveness is recognized as a
strategic imperative in commercial competitive and military environments.
In this paper, we provide a critical assessment of the literature on responsive space and
introduce a new multi-disciplinary framework for thinking about and addressing issues of space
responsiveness. Our framework advocates three levels of responsiveness: a global industry-wide
responsiveness, a local stakeholder responsiveness, and an interactive or inter-stakeholder
responsiveness. We introduce and motivate the use of “responsiveness maps” for multiple
stakeholders. We then identify “levers of responsiveness,” technical spacecraft- and launch-centric,
as well as “soft” levers (e.g., acquisition policies) for improving the responsiveness of the space
industry. Finally, we propose a series of research questions to aggressively tackle problems associated
with space responsiveness