10 IEEE ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT REVIEW, VOL. 43, NO. 4, FOURTH QUARTER, DECEMBER 2015 From Product to Business-Centric Organizational Structures —FELIX LUSTENBERGER President-Elect 2014/2015 Manager, IEEE TEMS Helmut Fischer AG IN the past as well as today, companies very often define themselves through the products they offer to the market. However, the product offerings have changed tremendously over the last 10–20 years: while in the past, most products were tangible, i.e., hardware-defined objects, nowadays companies are dealing, very often if not mostly, with non-tangible products such as software, services or advice. According to the CIA World Fact Book 2014 [1], over 2/3 of the world's GDP is found in the category of services which includes all non-tangible products offered and traded by organizations world wide. In the top world economies, the amount of service easily reaches up into the 70–80% bracket and hence outpaces all other economic activities by far. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves: have all these companies also adapted their organizational structure to the new environment? We will try to resolve this mystery in the following short paragraphs by using a well-known but nevertheless pertinent example from recent technological and economic history. FROM THE GREEK TEMPLE Traditionally, hardware-producing companies have been built around their hardware products. The process often started in the central research department of the company or group with a basic evaluation of technology and processes. These results then were passed on to the product development entity that tried to develop a product that could be produces in large quantities. Sometimes an industrialization group was linked between R&D and production in order to iron out wrinkles still present in the lab-scale prototypes and functional samples. Finally, sales got the shipping-ready products in their hands and went to their customers with a respective offer. Not uncommon in these early days of industrialization was the fact that R&D figured out the needs of the customers by themselves without asking sales and marketing, just by taking their best guess from an engineering perspective. Sometimes these best guesses were on spot, but not uncommonly also completely disjointed with customer requirements as has been seen many times in history of technology products where only second or third attempts started to match customer requirements. For many decades, the companies' organizational structure was built upon the above-mentioned crude process flow: each department led their activities in a completely compartmentalized, vertical silo structure with a C-level head that reported to the CEO of the company. Only at that level, there existed a complete overview of the activities, processes and entanglements between the various activities. If drawn in a simple picture, a Greek temple would come closest: each department or activity lived and worked in their separate pillar, withal pillars held together by the frieze or C-level leadership on which lays the roof of the temple, i.e., the CEO and the administrative board of the company. As can easily be seen, the output of each pillar or silo is pumped to the one standing next to it and hence the exchange of information takes