We are not going to be able to eliminate all overhead activities, at least not without new innovation, beyond all known organizational strategies. The remaining corporate organizations at Autodesk would include all activities which clearly have an important purpose, but for which there is no clear way to make the accounting either effective or useful.
Accounting and Finance
MIS
New Business Development
Advanced Technology
UNIX Network System Administration
Personnel
Operations
Legal
It might be possible to make our legal department a service center. However, a legal error by a single product line can have such terrifying consequences for the entire company, it makes sense to eliminate any hint of incentive to avoid using these services. So, the legal department sneaks in as a corporate function.
Later, it might be worthwhile for us to explore splitting legal functions into corporate requirements which serve as corporate functions, and other functions which could become billable services. However, this proposal makes all of Legal a corporate function.
It would also be possible, because of its anti-piracy efforts, to treat legal as a business unit. However, this also creates a number of odd incentives on the participants, so this alternative has been rejected until someone makes a really cogent case for it.
The maintenance of the UNIX network by one group, and the 3Com network by another, will get more exciting as we move marketing and technical people together. This relationship will require review as we move into the restructuring. For the moment, however, this proposal leaves MIS and the UNIX Network System Administration groups alone.