This analyst opinion says that bureaucracy is good practice. It really means that we should eliminate bureaucracy and replace it with good practices, which have to be justified, audited, minimized, and governed. Who governs the governance?

Omdia view

Summary

One commentator said that bureaucracy is “the technology of power” to ensure power and decision-making are kept at the organization’s top. Bureaucracy is easy to implement and is infinitely scalable. Finally, bureaucracy “solidifies” over time and is hard to dismantle. Bureaucracy should be replaced with good practices.

What is bureaucracy?

Bureaucracy combines two words: bureau- and the suffix -cracy. The word bureau originally meant a desk or writing stand and mutated to mean an office or place of work. Finally, it came to mean a division of government. The suffix -cracy denotes power, rule, or government. A benign interpretation of corporate bureaucracy might be “the rules of the workplace.” However, the word is often understood to mean “excessive insistence on unnecessary procedures and red tape.” And in most companies, this is what the average employee sees and experiences. Some say that a bureaucracy is a strategic system designed to ensure power remains at the top of an organization.