Amazon.com business model and operations

Amazon.com

Organizational diagnosis is an effective instrument in determining the efficiency of the organization, its capacity to perform well and to maximize its profits. On the other hand, organizational diagnosis helps identify potential problems in the activity of the company and to initiate a process to solve these. A properly performed organizational diagnosis will determine whether change interventions are necessary and how it is best to implement these.

One of the important advantages of the organizational diagnosis process is that it creates the appropriate premises to view the company as a complete, total system. As such, the evaluation will be made by taking into consideration the entire factors that affect the company as a unitary entity rather than just factors that influence particular divisions or departments. If the potential problems that are identified are at an organizational level, this ensures that the solutions will also be implemented at the same level.

There are several organization diagnosis models that can be used, many of these evolving historically as organizations evolved as well. The first model we will evaluate is the force field analysis. The force field analysis model is based on the existence of driving forces and restraining forces. Driving forces generally encourage a change in the organization, while restraining forces act as opposing to change. The fact that this model is relatively simple makes it easy to implement in virtually any organization. However, this model is too simple to comprise the entire implications that might affect a company. Further more, it is often difficult to simply include factors as either driving or restraining factors.

The Leavitt's Model has expanded the force field analysis model. It is better adapted, because specific applicable variables are identified in the organization as driving forces. These can be structural, human, technological or task variables, with the idea that a change in any of these impacts the other three variables. The problem with this model is that it only discusses the internal factors of an organization. What happens to all the external, environmental factors that affect the development of a company?

Likert's system tends to see things from a managerial perspective, describing the different types of management systems in organizations. While very useful from this perspective, it is limited by it as well.

The open systems model better surprises the relationship between the internal and external environment by actually providing the idea that the organizations, as social systems, depend on the environment in which they operate, from where inputs determining decisions are likely to come. This theory is well applicable nowadays, when the actions of a company are generally conditioned by the market environment itself.

The Weisbord Six-Box model has similar limitations as some of the previous models in that it aims to be exhaustive in identifying input elements and categories that would reflect organizational life. Additionally, his focus is again on internal issues of the company, which makes the model incomplete.

The Nadler - Tushman model for organization analysis is definitely more complete in including, within the same model, both inputs and outputs, as well as throughputs. However, it is quite complex and would be sensibly costly to implement in an organization, where all the specific variables that need to be included in the model would have to be monitored and taken into consideration. Further more, some of these variables may be irrelevant in the case of particular companies.

The McKinsey 7S framework is again based on the perception of the existence of internal and external variables, as well as their interdependency. The seven variables are structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff and shared values. However, the model does not mention the external environment or any variables that belong to that segment. For a company such as amazon.com, the external environment is especially important, mainly because it is volatile enough to produce continually new competitors and new variables to be considered.

The Tichy's Technical Political Cultural framework is following the open systems perspective. Further more, it is a framework that takes into consideration the mission and strategy of the company, which is an important additional aspect. Additionally, the framework concentrates its efforts on the actual organizational effectiveness, which is basically the main objective of any organizational diagnostics analysis.