Technological, managerial and organizational capabilities of customer-centric organizations

This paper examines characteristics and limitations of past and current manufacturing organizations, and it extends their frontiers by proposing technological, managerial and organizational capabilities which configure the new face of the industrial organization in the 21st century. From such an analysis, it introduces the concept of customer-centric systems which represent new organizational production models that pursue high degrees of organizational cognition, intelligence and autonomy, and consequently, high degrees of agility and flexibility, in order to manage high levels of environmental complexity, to operate through intensive mass customization, and to provide customers with immersiveness. From all these backgrounds, this research contributes by proposing the concept of new organizations with structure and processes of computational organization management networks. In such a new organization type, cognitive machines and cognitive information systems are prominent actors of governance, automation and control of the whole enterprise.