VeriSign's role in domain name infrastructure and security

VeriSign

The organizing function is considered the ensemble of management processes through which physical and intellectual processes are established and delimited together with their components. The process continues with grouping them on work positions, compartments, and attributing them to the company's personnel based on managerial, economic, technical, and social criteria, in order for the established objectives to be attained.

VeriSign makes no exception. At VeriSign, the organizing function establishes who and how contributes to reaching the established objectives. The answer to these questions are represented by the combination between human resources and indirectly, of material, informational, and financial resources, regarding each compartment or work position, and the organization as a whole.

VeriSign's organizing function is divided into two main subdivisions. The first one consists in the general organization of the company represented by establishing the organizational structure and the informational system. Through these basic components of VeriSign's management system, the company's structure is ensured and is subordinated towards reaching the company's fundamental objectives. This part of the organizing function is exerted by VeriSign's top management, significantly conditioning the efficiency of the entire management process.

The second major category is represented by organizing the company's main components: research and development, production, personnel, and others. This component refers more to quantity. This component is achieved at medium and inferior management level, given the necessity of taking into consideration the specifics of management and execution processes that are subjected to the organizing function.

In VeriSign's case the tendency is to exert the organizing function in a supple and flexible vision, aiming at diminishing the size of managerial departments and increasing their efficiency (Freeman & Cameron, 1993).

Resource optimization is probably the key to VeriSign's success. Certain experts in the field recommend a five step program in order to optimize the company's resources and processes. These steps are: defining the objective to reflect organizational mission and strategy, getting executive buy-in and foster accountability, defining the conceptual resource optimization model, formulating the resource optimization model, implementing and updating the model (Goren et al., 2009).

The company's mission consists in providing high quality products and services for VeriSign's customers, helping them achieve their established objectives. In order to obtain such results, VeriSign's human resources must be carefully selected based on their verified skills, knowledge, and abilities in conformity with the requirements of each job.

Existing personnel must be further trained. This is because the environment in which VeriSign activates is continuously changing and the company must adapt to these changes in order to maintain successful. This includes VeriSign's employees also.

The most important resource that a company can employ is represented by the human resources. VeriSign makes no exception. The company is aware that employees must be satisfied in order to provide quality work processes.

In 2007, VeriSign noticed that its strategy at the time was not in accordance with market's demands anymore. As a consequence, the company announced the public about "a change to our business strategy to be more tightly-aligned with our core competencies, which is to provide highly scaleable, reliable and secure Internet infrastructure services to customers around the world. The strategy calls for divesture of a number of non-core businesses in our portfolio, such as communications, billing and commerce, content delivery, messaging and enterprise security services" (VeriSign, 2007).

Given the change of general strategy, the situation requires changes regarding resource allocation. In such a situation human resources become more important than they are in a normal, usual situation. Some of the company's managers were in charge of modifying the previous strategy and implementing the new one, in a very smooth manner, so that the company's activities are not affected by the changes. The situation was also favored by the fact that VeriSign has a very flexible organizational situation that is able to quickly adapt to significant changes.

The financial sector of the company is also affected by the change of strategy. Financial resources must be allocated to new activities imposed by the new implemented strategy. But this also means that these financial resources must be taken from other activities, at least partly. It is very difficult to establish what activities will be deprived by part of their attributed financial resources and how much will they lose in favor of other activities of the business.