Business and non-business value creating organizations in the "Information and internet age"

This study seeks to present a theoretical framework to analyse the influence of Web-Based Information Technologies (WBITs) on the efficiency of the production organization, as revealed by the latter’s economic and financial performance. Accepting the assumption that the activity for the production of value is carried out by permanent organizations, I propose several basic definitions to show how production organizations can be considered as autopoietic systems which are coupled to the environment, as well as teleonomic systems that can continue to exist only as long as their performance as systems for the production of value is appreciated by the environment. The preceding definitions and models permit us to examine how the Web-Based Information Technologies (WBITs) can integrate the structure of the production-oriented organizations, considered as cognitive systems, by strengthening the forms by which they realize their structural coupling with the environment by developing their Learning Management Capabilities and their autopoiesis. In particular, the WBITs influence the structural coupling of the organization as well as its cognitive activity. To develop knowledge, the organization and its management – with the use of groupware technologies, business intelligence and analytical applications – must undertake a process of collective learning, thereby transforming itself into a learning organization and a learning management. On the basis of the previous considerations we can make some general comments about the process of change that is so vast and sudden as that produced by the spread of the WBITs.