Organizational Structures In Collaborative Work Environments: The Return of the Matrix?

Abstract

After major petroleum companies successfully implemented the hardware, tools and applications in Collaborative Work Environments (CWE), human factor issues remain unsolved. Working in these Collaborative Work Environments cuts across traditional disciplinary and geographically dispersed boundaries. Less hierarchical reporting relationships and multi-disciplinary teams replace clear-cut single hierarchical reporting relationships and single-disciplinary teams. The new way of collaborative working calls for supporting organic organizational structure for the CWE. Most current organizational structures of operating units are divided into several divisions (for example oil, gas or geographical divisions). In turn, these divisions are organized into functional technical departments (for example Reservoir Engineers together in one department and Production Technologists in another department). Alignment of the overall traditional functional organizational structures of the operating unit with the more organic structure of the CWE is a real challenge. In the past, the petroleum industry had many different forms of organizational structure. To capture both functional requirements and the need to collaborate, they have returned to the matrix structure. We provide empirical results of several cases of Collaborative Work Environments (of different operating units) in the petroleum industry. We show both the issues faced and the path chosen by the operating units to align the overall organizational structure of the operating unit with the Collaborative Work Environment structure.