nes, ready to be upgraded and improved from time to time, at pace with the current technology advances. Again, Microsoft presents the definitive example of such a company.Organizational Design for the 21st CenturyAny business or business process has had to face a certain level of re-engineering or reconstruction in order to fit into the managerial revolution of the 1990s and the move into the 21st century. Even the world’s most major companies, such as Microsoft, have had to deal with such issues. It is important, however, to understand that change, just by virtue of being change, cannot be considered as an innovative approach to organizational design or planning for the future. In fact, true innovation and planning for the future requires the most fundamental concepts of business process to first undergo a critical re-evaluation before actual changes are implemented. Microsoft then faces the additional challenges associated with the courts’ decisions regarding its status as a monopoly and its perceived unfair business practices.Evaluating and designing business processes requires understanding and changing both sociological and technological systems to establish the best fit for the new millennium. Researchers examining the issue from a broad range of perspectives have found that the business organization of the 21st century is expected to depart considerably from the traditional top-down design. (Remember, Bill Gates is no longer CEO of Microsoft but a "futurist" for the company.) To a some degree, it is exciting to realize that the organizational design of the future will reflect the realization of companies that they belong to a network or a web that includes many other players and that they must be aware of and supportive of those players. "Cooperation" has become the byword, along with "interaction," "informal," and "innovative." This model has been given a number of descriptions, including employee-empowered, flat, fl...
