Infrastructure, of Organizations

Historically, the structural elements of organizations have focused on bureaucratic or formal elements, social structures, and/or technology. While important, these should be further distinguished from the physical infrastructure of an organization. Organizational infrastructure represents the physical stock of an organization, or equipment employed in production. Infrastructure is distinguished from the labor employed in production. Education systems, for example, provide public instruction through a network of capital assets, or schools. Here the physical infrastructure necessary to produce the public instruction includes the school building, the classrooms, the spatial arrangement of classrooms, lighting, and other design elements of the school. Each is distinguished from the labor, or instructional staff. In a simple sense, organizational infrastructure includes those structures and equipment that are owned by the organization and used by employees to produce goods or services.

Infrastructure is popularly referred to in a civic context. In fact, city planners often refer to municipal infrastructure as a means to attract and retain housing and business development. Using this functional definition, infrastructure critical for development usually includes sewer lines, wastewater treatment facilities, water distribution systems, roads and highways, and public transport. Other capital facilities like school buildings, government offices, libraries, police and fire stations, recreation centers, and hospitals are intuitively important for commercial and residential development but are empirically difficult to determine whether they impact the location and timing of development. Yet they are part of the community infrastructure as well.

From the perspective of finance, organizational infrastructure is further distinguished from disposable materials, supplies, or services used in organizational production. Organizational infrastructure may be financed up front and/or over a long term. Conceptually, this is described as either pay-as-you-go or payas-you-use financing. Infrastructure typically benefits users for longer periods and almost always requires substantial resources. Since the benefits of infrastructure accrue over a long term, they are funded through bonding rather than annual budgeting. The large sums of capital resources necessary to create organizational infrastructure also require intensive capital and facilities planning. Advanced planning for the development of organizational infrastructure usually begins with inventories of existing spaces. More important, these planning activities ask questions about how people within an organization interact within those spaces. Organizational leaders often hire architects as [Page 507]consultants, but ideally architectural programmers or facilities planning specialists should be employed prior to the actual design. Facilities programmers and planners ask questions that range from an ergonomic to macro level. Questions are asked that assess the human-environment relations, such as, Is your workstation heated adequately, or lit well enough? When work teams meet, do they modify the conference rooms, or do those rooms work well? The results of these questions are tabulated and then developed into programming standards. Architects rely on those standards to develop construction designs for new work spaces. The construction plans often drive the financial plans and eventual bonding.