First, the design. The western business organization model, for reasons of history, has evolved
into a hierarchy of functionally specialized departments. Management direction, goals, and measurements
are deployed from the top downward through this vertical hierarchy. However, the
processes which yield the products of work, in particular those products which customers buy (and
which justify the existence of the organization), flow horizontally across the organization through
functional departments (Figure 6.1). Traditionally, each functional piece of a process is the responsibility
of a department, whose manager is held accountable for the performance of that piece.
However, no one is accountable for the entire process. Many problems arise from the conflict
between the demands of the departments and the demands of the overall major processes