General introduction
The environment changes…
The acceleration of the changes of all nature, social, political, economic, organisational, technological and human lead the company to adapt in a semi permanent way. This implies that the old rigid structures are unable to support the jolts of change.
The company must set up flexible structures, an evolutionary organization and the favorable framework in order to make it possible for those involved/ actors to succeed in handling the resistances to change in the dynamics of transformation of mentalities.
The three vectors of the change for an innovative organization are to control the competing environment, to unceasingly improve the unit of the processes and to benefit the best from the human resources by a team work on jointly negotiated objectives.
The social changes are characterized by consumers who are not satisfied any more with standard products, are attracted by low priced products and services, equipped with an irreproachable after-sales service and more highly more personalized offerings. The consumers requirements for quality pushes the company to adopt stricter controls. The company must take into account various desires and needs of the citizens who claim more freedom and for autonomy.
Political changes result in a transfer into private hands, hitherto public companies. Thereby increasing the climate of competition. In particular the deregulation of telecommunication (01/98). There is a confrontation between the authority of the national governments and the world network which crosses the borders becoming virtual.
Economic changes are characterized by the globalisation of the market, competition within the EEC, the USA and Japan which activates economic turbulence. The strategic driver of success for a company used to be its competitiveness, then the quality of its management or its information system.
Technological changes show us, in addition to the subject of this work, the significant projections made in the field of biotechnologies. Strategic data processing goes well beyond the business data processing when it utilizes telecommunications. We shall gradually pass from a synchronous mode of exchange of information between human beings to an asynchronous mode, thus defying time and space on a worldwide scale.
The changes of organization in the structures of the " modular " company highly induce Cooperation , and the complementarity of internal and external entities known as " partners ", making the borders of the organization fuzzy. Certain entities form part of other companies physically and logically but are integrated virtually by and the co-operative data base telecommunications networks. The flexibility of adaptability of the organization generated by the modular structure associated with the networks of telecommunication creates interdependence of a co-operative type of the organization with its environment reinforcing the links in spite of the nuclearisation. The costs of coordination become negligible if one in general considers the benefit generated by the co-operation by avoiding for example the stepping of the tasks (seized with the source, controls, pre processing, and diffusion). New forms of organization are necessary to structure the reports/ratios and to connect the actors of the internal organization with the broader/wider view of the company.
We will focus on information technologies and observe how they modify our way of working and how they structure companies and organisations.
We will observe how certain companies approach their customers and make their investments in Informationa nd communications technologies profitable. We will project the way in which companies collaborate and compete with itself in the future.
The human change vis-a-vis technological changes poses a problem of conscience and ethics of which the resolution necessarily passes by a reorganization taking into account the human dimension of change. We will comment on by a " human point of view " the projections technological. The human dimension of change is very delicate and at the same time reveals the training requirements.
The employees/main actors in the company feel threatened by information technologies; the leaders and the intermediate framing are not excluded from it. The question is to know how to dissipate this threat. We will focus some light on information technologies and will observe how they modify our way of working and how they structure the companies and the organizations.
We will also observe how certain companies approach their customers and make profitable the investments which they engaged in Communication and Information Technologies.
We will project the way in which the companies could collaborate and compete with itself in the future. We will report the observations which we made during experiments, we will pose working hypotheses and will reveal an original method of work and development of the attention and level of conscience individually and collectively. The work undertaken on the field of the conscience remains the building block at the end of this century and the beginning of the 3rd millenium.
