7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

‘Managing change’ refers to the making of changes in a planned and managed or
systematic fashion where the aim is to implement new methods and systems in an ongoing
organization in a more effective manner. Now, if one thinks of internal changes induced
by outside developments, then the most familiar instance of this kind of change is the
change or version control aspect of information system development projects. Here, the
events originating outside the organization trigger these internal changes. Literally the
two types of changes can be distinguished as a knee-jerk or reactive response and an
anticipative or proactive response.
Professional expertise is required to manage the changes; whether reactive or anticipative.
The process of change needs to be treated separately from the specifics of the situation.
The content or subject matter of change management consists chiefly of the models,
methods and techniques, tools, skills and other forms of knowledge that go into making up
any practice. The subject matter of change management is drawn from psychology,
sociology, business administration, economics, industrial engineering, systems
engineering and the study of human and organizational behavior.
3. Types of Changes
Change can be better managed if we are able to categorize them. Changes can be broadly
categorized as:
• Provoked by pressure or necessity
• Induced by gentle persuasion rather than force
• Enforced change
• Motivation by example and evidences
• Designed according to individual needs and requirements
4. Problems and Prospects
As discussed earlier, the problems faced during bringing about changes in any
organization have both content and a process dimension. Introducing a digital library setup
has different dimensions depending on the host organization. For instance, the user group
and its requirements of the digital library at a health university will be different from the
users of a defense laboratory library. In this situation, it is very difficult to suggest a
universal change management strategy, it needs to be defined and designed depending on
the need of the organization. The differences become more prominent in the case of
organizations with international user group with varied subject interests because the values
differ, the cultures differ and at the very basic level even the problems differ.
But, as the overall processes of change and change management remain pretty much the
same, so change management has evolved to become a discipline from a set of good
professional practices.
5. Processes
The process of change management can be studied as an amalgamation of following subprocesses
[4]:
• The Change Process as “Unfreezing, Changing and Refreezing”
• The Change Process as Problem Solving and Problem Finding
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