Computer-aided analysis of organizations

An organizational architecture consists of a number of decisionmakers, the information processing and decisionmaking functions they carry out, and their interactions. A constraint in the design of an organizational structure is that no decisionmaker be overloaded. Two performance measures are used to analyze and evaluate alternative organizational designs: (a) the accuracy of the response, as measured by a cost functional, and (b) the timeliness of the response as measured by the expected delay between the time a task is received and an output or response is produced.