The only thing that is permanent on the face of the earth is change; and this is also applied into different varieties of business. The change is somehow important if it is intended to begin the improvement. Every organization needs change in improving the business environment or managerial aspect. The change depends unto what extent it should reach and what difficulties it will cross. Sometimes, organization takes the changes to align in the economic variations and it is truly hard to pulse the wave of economic climate. Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc.
Typically, organizations must undertake organization-wide change to evolve to a different level in their life cycle, e.g., going from a highly reactive, entreprenueral organization to more stable and planned development. Transition to a new chief executive can provoke organization-wide change when his or her new and unique personality pervades the entire organization. Organizational change is defined as the process by which organizations reach the desired goals. Organizational change occurs when an organization restructures resources to increase the ability to create value and improve effectiveness. A declining company seeks ways to regain customers; a growing organization designs new products. A well-planned organizational change creates value for stakeholders. In a business manner, the organizational change is about a significant change in the organization, such as reorganization or adding a major new product or service. This is in contrast to smaller changes, such as adopting a new computer procedure. Organizational change can seem like such a vague phenomena that it is helpful. Any type of thinking about our world requires some kind of conceptual model, implicit or otherwise, which structures and guides our thinking and renders it meaningful. For studies of Organizational change, conceptual models and practical models are indispensable. Change is a necessary way of life in most organizations. Change is all around us in the dynamic society surrounding today’s organizations; the question of whether change will occur is no longer relevant. Organizational change is the alteration of work environment in organization. Automation plays an increasingly important role in the world economy and in daily experience. Engineers strive to combine automated devices with mathematical and organizational tools to create complex systems for a rapidly expanding range of applications and human activities.
Automation is the use of control systems (such as numerical control, programmable logic control, and other industrial control systems), in concert with other applications of information technology (such as computer-aided technologies [CAD, CAM, CAx]), to control industrial machinery and processes, reducing the need for human intervention. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization. Whereas mechanization provided human operators with machinery to assist them with the muscular requirements of work, automation greatly reduces the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well. Processes and systems can also be automated.
Many roles for humans in industrial processes presently lie beyond the scope of automation. Human-level pattern recognition, language recognition, and language production ability are well beyond the capabilities of modern mechanical and computer systems. Tasks requiring subjective assessment or synthesis of complex sensory data, such as scents and sounds, as well as high-level tasks such as strategic planning, currently require human expertise. In many cases, the use of humans is more cost-effective than mechanical approaches even where automation of industrial tasks is possible. Specialised hardened computers, referred to as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), are frequently used to synchronize the flow of inputs from (physical) sensors and events with the flow of outputs to actuators and events. This leads to precisely controlled actions that permit a tight control of almost any industrial process. Human-machine interfaces (HMI) or computer human interfaces (CHI), formerly known as man-machine interfaces, are usually employed to communicate with PLCs and other computers, such as entering and monitoring temperatures or pressures for further automated control or emergency response. Service personnel who monitor and control these interfaces are often referred to as stationary engineers. Currently, for manufacturing companies, the purpose of automation has shifted from increasing productivity and reducing costs, to broader issues, such as increasing quality and flexibility in the manufacturing process. The old focus on using automation simply to increase productivity and reduce costs was seen to be short-sighted, because it is also necessary to provide a skilled workforce who can make repairs and manage the machinery. Moreover, the initial costs of automation were high and often could not be recovered by the time entirely new manufacturing processes replaced the old. (Japan's "robot junkyards" were once world famous in the manufacturing industry.) Automation is now often applied primarily to increase quality in the manufacturing process, where automation can increase quality substantially. For example, automobile and truck pistons used to be installed into engines manually. This is rapidly being transitioned to automated machine installation, because the error rate for manual installment was around 1-1.5%, but has been reduced to 0.00001% with automation. Hazardous operations, such as oil refining, the manufacturing of industrial chemicals, and all forms of metal working, were always early contenders for automation.
Another major shift in automation is the increased emphasis on flexibility and convertibility in the manufacturing process. Manufacturers are increasingly demanding the ability to easily switch from manufacturing Product A to manufacturing Product B without having to completely rebuild the production lines. Flexibility and distributed processes have led to the introduction of Automated Guided Vehicles with Natural Features Navigation.
The main advantage of automation are:
* Replacing human operators in tedious tasks.
* Replacing humans in tasks that should be done in dangerous environments (i.e. fire, space, volcanoes, nuclear facilities, under the water, etc)
* Making tasks that are beyond the human capabilities such as handling too heavy loads, too large objects, too hot or too cold substances or the requirement to make things too fast or too slow.
* Economy improvement. Sometimes and some kinds of automation implies improves in economy of enterprises, society or most of humankind. For example, when an enterprise that has invested in automation technology recovers its investment; when a state or country increases its income due to automation like Germany or Japan in the 20th Century or when the humankind can use the internet which in turn use satellites and other automated engines.
Controversial factors
* Unemployment. It is commonly thought that automation implies unemployment because the work of a human being is replaced in part or completely by a machine. Nevertheless, the unemployment is caused by the economical politics of the administration like dismissing the workers instead of changing their tasks. Since the general economical policies of most of the industrial plants are to dismiss people, nowadays automation implies unemployment. In different scenarios without workers, automation implies more free time instead of unemployment like the case with the automatic washing machine at home. Automation does not imply unemployment when it makes tasks unimaginable without automation such as exploring mars with the Sojourner or when the economy is fully adapted to an automated technology as with the Telephone switchboard.
* Environment. The costs of automation to the environment are different depending on the technology, product or engine automated. There are automated engines that consume more energy resources from the Earth in comparison with previous engines and those that do the opposite too.
* Human being replacement. In the future there is a possibility that the Artificial intelligence could replace and improve a human brain and the robots would become not only fully automated but fully autonomous from the human beings (Technological singularity)
Rationalization is an informal fallacy of reasoning in which one constructs a logical justification for a belief, decision, action or lack thereof that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. It is a defense mechanism in which perceived controversial behaviors or feelings are explained in a rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation of the behavior or feeling in question. This process can be in a range from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly subconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt).
Rationalization is one of the defense mechanisms proposed by Sigmund Freud, which were later developed further by his daughter Anna Freud.
According to the DSM-IV rationalization occurs "when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for his or her own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self serving but incorrect explanations."
Re-engineering is the basis for many recent developments in management. The cross-functional team, for example, has become popular because of the desire to re-engineer separate functional tasks into complete cross-functional processes. Also, many recent management information systems developments aim to integrate a wide number of business functions. Enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, knowledge management systems, groupware and collaborative systems, Human Resource Management Systems and customer relationship management systems all owe a debt to re-engineering theory.
Paradigm shift is a change in a fundamental model of events, has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well, even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1977). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt an array of stances (e.g., Marxist criticism, Deconstruction, 19th-century-style literary criticism), which may be more of less fashionable during any given period but which are all regarded as legitimate.
It is a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change.
References:
http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/08/organizational-change.html
http://www.santarosa.edu/~ssarkar/cs66fl06/ch14notes.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(fallacy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://www.taketheleap.com/define.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
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