The Intelligent Organisation: Driving Systemic Change with Information

The Intelligent Organisation proposes a radically different way of designing organisations to capitalise on the potential offered by contemporary information capability. Integrated, coherent information is taken as a competitive advantage enabling synthesis of behaviour and processes in an organisation designed backwards from its customers to achieve desired outcomes. An Intelligent Organisation uses information to drive learning and adaptation at the level of individuals, tasks, processes and the whole organisation, to deliver transformational changes in business performance.

This fully updated second edition explores how to enable this change through systemic reinvention. Drawing on proven organisational applications exploiting data, information and management science, and grounded in tested theory, this book is not about incremental improvement but about fundamentally rethinking the whole. Building on the first edition, two chapters have been added to apply the ideas of the Intelligent Organisation to the individual as well as to the nation. Further discussion on the current issues around technology and ethics have been incorporated, as well as review questions and improved pedagogy. The text is supported by updated case studies throughout and a dedicated website, www.intelligentorganisation.com, with support materials for lecturers.

Uniquely bridging the gap between information systems and organisational behaviour, The Intelligent Organisation will be of particular significance to master’s and undergraduate students of Information Systems, Knowledge Management and Organisational Theory.

John Beckford is a partner in Beckford Consulting and Visiting Professor both in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London, UK, and in the Centre for Information Management, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, UK.