Controlling Systems

Kaiser Permanente has opted to use the bureaucratic control system to help meet the challenges of such complex environment. Bureaucratic control system is design to measure progress toward planned performance and to ensure that they are in line with management's objectives (2004). Today, bureaucratic ideas are still widely used among organizations to ensure success. Kaiser Permanente has found this system to be reliable, accurate and secure; all these terms have assisted our large complex organization to control its vast amount of employees.

The four major steps of the control system, which have to do with performance standards settings, measurement, comparing and taking corrective actions, serve as the artery of the organization. The partnership that Kaiser Permanente and Labor have entered has contributed to the success of management's daily operations (Local 399). This partnership maintains a formal process where all decision making starts from the bottom, and it will work its way up until a consensus is reached. This mechanism allows upper management to focus on issues that require precise attention. On the negative side of this wonderful control mechanism, the results of decision-making can be a complex one because it has to travel through all the channels until a consensus is achieved.

The several characteristics that have mold Kaiser Permanente into following the bureaucracy model are laws and government regulations, hierarchy and its partnership with the union. The bureaucratic control system has demonstrated its effectiveness and it has become an important tool for its success. Nevertheless, any healthcare providers will face a bumpy road at any time given.

Telepacific Communications uses several methods to measure operational performance of our business process in a timely and accurate fashion. A key in Telepacific's controlling mechanism is the Information Systems aspect of record keeping and performance.

This allows numbers and metrics to be recorded and goals constantly measured in the form of numbers. One thing we've learned in the past year is of the global management-level goal of converting any goal in the form of numbers. Instead of saying, "We must provide better internal customer service" we say, "We must obtain 90% internal customer satisfaction" by using a paper trail of satisfaction surveys.

The same goes for any systems related goals. "We must maintain email for 99.999% of the time." So, if anything might occur in our email systems, a production incident report must be created and posted with details such as: length of time the outage has occurred and total downtime report.

For my own goals and requirements of the staff reporting to myself, we aim to resolve 90% of user-end technical support & analysis issues within 24 hours. On top of that, we aspire to complete the same task for 95% of all issues within 48 hours, using the pyramid scheme.