Policies for Self-Managing Communities in Agile Organizations

Abstract

Modern management practice is increasingly focused on human resource management as enterprises attempt to become more agile in response to ever changing customer requirements, competitive environments and technological innovation. This typically involves moving to flatter organizational structures with the devolution of decision-making authority to increasingly self-managed teams. It also requires flexible and complex flows of communication within and between teams. Collaborative and workflow IT system must therefore become increasingly flexible to support the frequent changes in communication flows that come from agile work practices based around project and team-centered working. However, such IT systems are still largely managed using techniques designed for centralized IT administration. In this paper we show how a recent innovation in community-based policy-based management allows the IT administration to be de-centralized in a way that reflects and is highly responsive to the needs of devolved decision-making in agile organization.