Organizational Simulation and Information Systems Design: An Operations Level Example
通过模拟医院患者调度任务中不同的分布式决策方法，揭示了组织结构、信息系统与任务环境之间的复杂互动，表明通用的先验假设可能不成立，组织特定模拟有助于权衡设计方案。
The interplay between organizational structure, the decisions made by agents within the structure, and the technology supporting those agents is an important and complex, but not well understood, phenomenon in modern organizational studies. In this paper we describe how simulating key aspects of an organization's structure, in this case a hospital, can yield insights into the design of information systems and their performance. In particular, we report on a project that simulates alternative distributed decision-making approaches for patient scheduling tasks. The results indicate that there are important and complicated interactions between the alternative organizational structures simulated, the form of the information systems supporting those structures, and the task environment. This suggests that current, universal, a priori assumptions about the interplay between technology and organizational structure are questionable. Furthermore, organization-specific simulation is seen as a potentially useful method of explicating the important tradeoffs in alternative design possibilities.