BEYOND BUREAUCRACY: A MULTI LAYERED FRAMEWORK FOR ORGANISATIONAL AGILITY IN INDIA’S OIL & GAS PSUS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53555/bma.v11i1.2476Keywords:
Organisational agility, Bureaucracy; delayering, cross-functional teams, communication architecture, real time decision makingAbstract
India's oil and gas Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) live in a contradiction: they must guarantee energy security at the
nation's level, but they also compete against the competition in markets that demand rapidity, proximity to the customer
and relentless optimisation of the operations. Bureaucratic layering, functionally siloed organisations and sequential
approval processes can hamper downstream and upstream value chain responsiveness. This study builds a multiـlayered
organisational agility framework specific to Indian oil and gas PSUs focussing on (i) flattening of hierarchies, (ii) cross
- functional team work, (iii) communication structures and (iv) real time decision making structures. Using several
case studies of real-world requirements of Indian Oil and Gas Companies (IndianOIL - IOCL, Bharat Petroleum Company
Limited - BPCL, ONGC), the paper triangulates evidence from vendor/partner case studies, public disclosures and
industry technical papers. The contributions are threefold: (1) a practical "Agility Stack" which relates governance,
structure, data, as well as operation decisions; (2) a replicable measurement approach through a structured content -
analysis index; and (3) a testable latent variable model amenable to survey-based validation (PLS-SEM). Evidence shows
that digitised enterprise backbones, integrated planning and operations platforms, and collaborative environments
decrease the latency of decision making, and allow for cross-unit coordination, but delayering, the redesign of the span
of control, and delegated decision rights, are still patchy and this is the most critical next step for PSU agility.
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