Hierarchical Organization as a Facilitator of Information Management in Human Collaboration

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relationship between three entities: hierarchical organization, information management and human collaboration. This relationship is composed of two parts: the first part is the relationship between the hierarchical organization and information management where the role of the hierarchical organization to facilitate the information management processes is discussed. The second part is the relationship between information management and human collaboration where the role of information management to improve human collaboration in problem solving is discussed. The information management processes are illustrated through an information management life cycle model. This model has three major stages: active, semi-active and inactive stages and has three major phases: creation, searching and utilization phases. The creation phase includes: information creation and using, information authoring and modifying and information organization and indexing. The searching phase includes: information storage and retrieving and information exchange. The utilization phase includes: information accessing and filtering processes. The arguments about the role of hierarchical organization in information management and human collaboration are also discussed. The author showed that the hierarchical organization acts as a facilitator for common information management processes which are required in team collaboration such as: information gathering, organization, retrieving, filtering, exchange, integration or fusion, display and visualization. Human collaboration models are discussed with emphasis on the team collaboration structural model which has four unique but interdependent stages of team collaboration. These stages are: team knowledge construction, collaborative team problem solving, team consensus, and product evaluation and revision. Each stage has four levels: meta-cognition process which guides the overall problem solving process, the information processing tasks which is required by the team to complete each collaboration stage, the knowledge required to support the information processing tasks and the communication mechanisms for knowledge building and information processing. The author focused on the role of information management to improve human collaboration across the four collaboration stages of the team collaboration structural model. He showed that the hierarchical organization is more efficient for information management processes and team collaboration rather than other alternative organizations such as flat, linear and network organizations.