THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Alignment means putting things in-line so they work together optimally.
Organizational alignment means putting the elements of an organization in-line so they work well together in support of the goal(s) of the company. These elements can be people, departments, teams, task forces, information systems, production facilities, control concepts, organizational structures and more.
The three key research questions are:
1) Cause: Why are elements of an organization NOT working together smoothly?
2) Cost: What are the costs of organizational misalignment?
3) Cure: What can be done to improve the Alignment?
One of our hypotheses is that many alignment problems originate at the top of the organization. For example, the commercial strategy may not be aligned with the operations strategy of a production department. The consequences of this will show up in the daily work of employees. Perhaps there seems to be no conflict of interest between the target of the commercial VP (highest possible revenue) and the target for the production director (low costs per product). However, the translation of these targets to the daily work of the sales reps and production operators will show that there is a fundamental conflict of interest with many issues to solve, for example:
• What do we promise to our customers and under what conditions?
• How fast can we deliver?
• How flexible are we with special customer requests?
This is what we call “horizontal misalignment”.
Another hypothesis is that corporate goals and objectives are not translated into complementary goals and objectives in the operational departments. Many top managers lie awake at night, wondering if their strategy is understood, accepted and implemented on the work floor.
We call this "vertical misalignment”.
The third form of misalignment involves various support services such as Finance and Accounting, Human Resources, and Information Technology.
Measuring the costs of misalignment takes place through targeted surveys.
CAUSES
Causes of misalignment can have a variety of origins. The first is outdated or misused management concepts or techniques. While some of these were developed in the 1950s and no longer meet the requirements of our time, many of their elements continue to be applied in various forms.
The third cause of misalignment involves the design of organizations. It is our conviction that good organizational design starts with understanding the characteristics of the primary process and its coordination needs. The control concept should be designed with the primary process as the starting point. Only after defining the controls, should one start designing the organizational structure and the information concept. All too often, this sequence of logical dependencies is neglected.
