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ChaPter 2 • underStanding and modeling organizational SyStemS 23

Figure 2.3
A depiction of the personal
perspective of functional managers
Production
Distribution
shows that they feature their own
functional area as central to the
Purchasing
Marketing organization.

Finance

How a Marketing Manager May View the Organization

Finance

Production
Marketing

Purchasing Distribution

How a Production Manager May See the Organization

perspective shows the business as driven by marketing, with all other functional areas interre-
lated but not of central importance. By the same token, the perspective of a production manager
positions production at the center of the business, with all other functional areas driven by it.
The relative importance of functional areas as revealed in the personal perspectives of man-
agers takes on added significance when managers rise to the top through the ranks, becoming
strategic managers. They can create problems if they overemphasize their prior functional infor-
mation requirements in relation to the broader needs of the organization.
For example, if a production manager is promoted but continues to stress production sched-
uling and performance of line workers, the broader aspects of forecasting and policy making
may suffer. This tendency is a danger in all sorts of businesses: where engineers work their way
up to become administrators of aerospace firms, college professors move from their departments
to become deans, or programmers advance to become executives of software firms. Their tun-
nel vision often creates problems for the systems analyst trying to separate actual information
requirements from desires for a particular kind of information.
Enterprise Systems: Viewing the Organization as a System
Enterprise system, or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, is a term used to describe
an integrated organizational (enterprise) information system. Specifically, ERP is software that
helps the flow of information between the functional areas in the organization. It is a customized
system that, rather than being developed in-house, is usually purchased from one of the software
development companies well known for its ERP packages, such as SAP or Oracle. The product
is then customized to fit the requirements of a particular company. Typically, the vendor requires
an organizational commitment in terms of specialized user or analyst training.