The org board is rumored to have come from Ron's recollection of an anchient galactic civilization. If so, then I would point out that that civilization is now dust.
Any organization pattern worked out in detail and carried through into practice would be useful to an organization, and the Scientology org board has its good points and is certainly no worse than most of the management structures used in this society. But its far from perfect.
The older 7 division pattern was expanded out into 9 divisions based on Ron's coming up with the Mind/Body/Product theory that divides the organization structure in progressions of three (3 executive divisions each divided into 3 regular divisions which are each divided up into 3 departments etc.).
The theory itself is actually quite reasonable, but the application of that theory to devising the pattern of the org was flawed.
When you see a successful team of 3 partners launching a business, one of them will ineveitably be an expert in producing the product of the business. The other two may consist of an expert at organization and an expert at sales and marketing. And if its only a team of 2, then one is an expert at producing and the other is the salesman and promoter and they will somehow or other manage the organizational hat between them. It never really works if you're missing the technical person who can really produce the product.
If its a software company, one of the top 3 has to be a software guru or you're dead. And if its cars you're building, then one of the 3 had better be an automotive engineer. If you've got a hospital and one of the 3 top execs isn't a doctor, then you'd just better forget it.
Established companies often violate this rule, and they lose their ability to deliver the product and they sink.
If you only have the organizational executive, then there is nothing to sell and nobody to sell it and therefore it is the least important of the three.
If you only have the salesman, then its all promotion and no delivery and you end up with what's known as a get rich scheme or a con game.
If you only have the technical hotshot who can produce, you end up with these obscure but well respected little firms that gradually develope a small following but achieve little market penetartion. Even so, this is the only one of the three that has any chance at all of surviving alone and therefore is the most critical to the entire venture.
For a Scientology org, one of the 3 senior executives must be a super expert on the tech and his executive division must be devoted to the technical aspects of the subject.
When Ron did his division by 3s, he created a set of 3 public divisions in one executive division and also had a dissemination division (more sales) in another. So the structure was heavy with PR. And to make room for this, he bundled up a treasury division along with the technical and qual (QA) divisions to form an executive division whose manager would be just as concerned with money as with real delivery. So his pattern is weak on actual production and he regulates the technical hotshots to a lower rung in the management hierarchy.
Its not surprising that we see so much promotion and so few results with such an org board.
A better pattern would be as follows:
1st Executive Division: Organizational (this is what the org calls the HCO exec div.)
1.1 External affairs (the president's office, planning, legal, etc.)
1.2 Internal Management (this is the org's HCO division) (personel, communications, ethics)
1.3 Treasury (income, disbursements, supplies) (in Ron's pattern, he has this in the 2nd exec below and places the dissemination division here instead)
2nd Executive division: Production / Technical
2.1 Auditor Training (this is only a department in Ron's pattern) (for software, this would be the analysts and designers, for building houses this would be the architects, etc.)
2.2 Processing (Auditing) (this and 2.1 above are both just departments in Ron's single technical division) (in other businesses, this is the appropriate main line production)
2.3 Qual (QA)
3rd Executive Division: Sales and Marketting
3.1 Sales (Dissemination)
3.2 Marketing (the public divisions) (this spreads across 3 divisions in Ron's plan)
3.3 Publications (Ron has this as a department in the dissem division. But this is a critical area. It is a key element in the spread of a subject).
As a further justification for giving publications its own separate division, one of the key reasons behind IBMs success was its exceptionally large publications division. They are one of the largest publishers in the world. They combined this with a fantastically strong sales force and swept the market in the early days of computers.
At a minimum, this pattern at least assures that one of the key people at the top really knows the score on the business that the organization is in.