Assessing Information Alignment in Production Organizations

Abstract

Alignment is defined as the proper positioning or adjustment of resources in relation to each other. Organization alignment involves aligning many different levels of an organization and its business segments to allow more accurate predictability of organization performance. To align an organization requires consideration of many different levels of vertical and lateral alignment of processes, resources, and information. Alignment research involves interaction implications, level of coordination implications, and geographic implications as well as resource and information need, and resource and information generation. One of the challenges of alignment is directly connecting deficiencies to their underlying issues. This is due to the weak link between organization metrics of performance and alignment factors. This study discusses issues that alignment alleviates in reference to process efficiency, procedure errors, operator errors, knowledge loss, and forecasting.