From organization to actor: the process of achiev-ing usable facilities in the healthcare sector

Paper in proceeding, 2006

This paper presents a pilot study on the process of providing premises and its result in means of meeting the clients´ expectations. The pilot study is part of a larger study investigating the efficiency in processes of providing facilities in the healthcare sector. The outset for the larger study is that a common opinion among representatives of core business and corporate real estate is that the finished projects do not meet expectations regarding usability and function for core business. A small number of Swedish public real estate companies have been transformed into service organizations. .A discussion whether to use a real estate organizational form or a service organization is rooted in the increased demands of achieving efficient and usable buildings satisfying the users’ needs. Two main questions were set up in this pilot study: i) In which ways does the organization form or structures impact the process of providing premises? and ii) How does the way of organization impact the individuals’ possibilities to act in the process of providing premises? The purpose of the study presented is thus to analyse the role of the organizational form and the individuals possibilities to act in the process of providing premises in terms of how they achieve fulfilment of expectations regarding usability for the healthcare core business. Tentative results in this paper based on the pilot study are that results from a project by means of meeting the clients´ expectations, quite contrary to an early assumption, do not depend on the organizational form or structure in the providing organization. The study is based on interviews and the result shows that all of the interviewed actors mean that the form of the organization has little direct impact on the result of the process of providing premises; it is how the actor views their work tasks that make the difference for the result. On the other hand, these views depend on the fundamental values in the organization.