Analysis of Organizational Architectures for the Air Force Tuition Assistance Program

The consideration of restructuring through a change in organizational architecture is often a fiercely debated issue within an organization. The argument for restructuring to improve quality, customer service, and financial management is pitted against perceived lack of job security and historically poor results from previous restructuring initiatives. To balance all sides when considering a change in organizational architecture, the organization should use a method of evaluating potential architectures that assists in determining the best new architecture and generates support from those involved. The objective of this research is to provide the Air Force Education Division with a defendable methodology for evaluating and selecting an organizational architecture. This thesis effort utilizes Value-Focused Thinking to develop a model that identifies the values associated with the management and execution of the Tuition Assistance (TA) program. The resulting value model is used to evaluate how well different organizational architectures perform with respect to these values. The results of the analysis suggest the implementation of an organizational architecture in which a single office handles the payment of invoices and a central database stores all enrollment and funding data would best enable the TA program to fulfill its role in meeting the needs of the Air Force.