Organizational Structure Essay

†¢ Describe the organizational structure of your selected organization. Compare and contrast that structure with two different organizational structures. Google seems like a logical choice to use for my selected organization. Google is innovative and braces technology while others are not. Google understands its organizational structure well and that is where the innovation starts. Google embraces the fact that they can use the internet to conduct business and can hire in any country that allows this. How does this model differ from Sears? Sears and Kmart merged and are still having a hard time making the organization viable. Sears used to have mail order catalogues available to their customers and quit using this means a few years back. They lost business because that was their staple and this came as this sort of business was booming. They went backwards in my opinion and hurt sales. While Google diversifies into technological areas Sears does not. The company Amazon has seen the potential of the internet and has made strides selling their product to many world-wide. They embrace technology and prosper because of it. If Sears wants to evolve into the twenty first century, they need to use technology to compete with competitors. There are many tools in the organizational structure and technology is just one used for this paper. I think that Sears is a bureaucratic structure in nature. They have changed their organizational structure a few times probably because the board of directors were not happy with the old one and did not see it as viable. Sears is probably a matrix structure now. They need to diversify to compete and picked a winning organizational structure and stick with it will see them prosper in the futur e. Unless they change, they will not have a chance in the future. Amazon and Google are virtual structures. Some may argue that Amazon is a network structure. â€Å"One of the important issues for business model design is to develop a method for identifying a specific company’s business model structure. The purpose of this research is thus to propose a new systematical method for understanding and identifying business model structure.† (Ming-Hone, Yu-De, & Yea-Huey, 2011, p.232) †¢ Evaluate how organizational functions (such as marketing, finance, human resources, and operations) influence and determine the organizational structure of your selected organization. Marketing in Google is one of the best organizational functions. They have a market that other could only dream of. The Google search engine is used by millions if not billions of potential customers. This is an already established means of marketing. By diversifying into other services, Google can target a multitude of potential customers on their search engine. Finances are cut to a minimum when most of the information and marketing is online. The virtual structure has done well for Google. They can hire from all over the world to expand their operations with ease. Google uses grounded theory that incorporates systematic and rigorous procedures for qualitative data collection and analysis. This lets them use data to see trends and capitalize on the information. Data collection, analysis, and theory are their bread and butter. Google took one million dollars and turned it into four billion dollars with this business model. Social networking is a tool used by Google in determining goals set forth by this organization. Google Ads was a good idea and worked out well. Google AdSense empowers online publishers to earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on a wide variety of online content. This gives everyone the chance to market a product in a cost effective way. The diversity of Google and the data mined from customers has made this company a giant in the industry. Face it Google is everywhere. Finance is minimal in a virtual organization for obvious reasons. They need servers to keep the information that is data mined and programmers to setup programming for the business. Technology can keep the cost down but it is still expensive to keep this sort of business going. It is still cheaper than traditional means. †¢ Explain how organizational design (such as geographic, functional, customer-based, product, service, hybrid, matrix, marketing channels, and departmentalization) helps determine which structure best suits your selected organization’s needs. Organizational design plays a major part in the business model of Google. Geographical location is not a problem for Google. The internet has made the world smaller and cost effective to do business around the world. Functional design is already in place for Google. They have a brand that everyone in the world knows. Google is customer based and that is their product. This works well together with the services aspect. They came out with Google Maps that was a big success. AdSense has taken off. Google Sky is another product. The main product is Google’s search engine. This by itself gives them trends into the minds of millions of people every single day. This also can be used for advertising anything they want to market. Data mining and watching trends of their customers would be a great way to diversify into something that is taking off. Sometimes I think this is too much power for one company. Monopoly laws will have to change world-wide for others to compete. Innovation is the mother of invention and I feel the world will adjust. The visions of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google have surpassed even their expectations. Departmentalization breaks processes up into departments. This is usually by taking a certain function of a company and dividing it into a functional department with specialists. Google does that well. A matrix groups employees by both function and product. This would be an ideal structure if specialists were taken into consideration in my opinion. Working well between those groups is where the problem lies. Google has its share of problems as do most organizations. Google is getting huge and I can see this being a problem in the future. I am sure this will evolve for the better. Fee based products are also in Google’s arsenal. There is a Google store and well as Google Books. The diversification is mind boggling. I have seen the Google Car was a bust. Only time will tell if this was viable.