ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the following strategies namely, flattening the management hierarchy, adopting total quality management and establishing empowered, Customer-focused organization cultures and structures. Each organization's approach to establishing a quality environment varies certain common elements underlies the variations: leadership, information and analysis, planning, human resources use, quality assurance of products and services, quality results, and customer satisfaction. The information systems (IS) department seeks information on customer satisfaction through surveys, interviews, and informal exchanges, analyzing feedback to determine how to serve its customers better. Some IS departments are converting from chargeback systems to staff services for sale, and others can anticipate pressure from their organizations to do so. The IS department takes responsibility for understanding customer requirements for information technology and developing plans for meeting and even anticipating those requirements. IS departments successful in establishing and sustaining empowered, customer-focused organizations with self-managing teams have used structural approaches to designing and establishing teams.
