In both good and bad economies, company functions such as human resources, finance and IT are in a continual cycle of growing and shrinking, centralizing and decentralizing. They seem to be continually re-engineering, downsizing, outsourcing or creating shared-service organizations. One day, these groups are asked to increase responsiveness; the next, they’re asked to cut costs and improve efficiency.
When management attempts to improve functions without aligning them with the larger organization as the primary outcome, it usually ends up hurting rather than helping overall business performance. In these functional changes, the following types of misalignments often occur:
