cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

The applications‘Factory’ organizations are completely dependent on the smoothrunning of their IT systems. For instance, a manufacturing unit mightgrind to a halt if the IT systems were to fail. However, with this type oforganization, innovative applications developments, although important,are not crucial to the organization’s ability to be competitive, except whenits performance starts to lag behind competitors, and a move to the‘strategic’ quadrant occurs.‘Turnaround’ organizations are those in which innovative applicationsdevelopments are crucial to the firm’s strategic success, but theday-to-day running of IT systems is not so critical. This might forexample be an organization developing e-learning packages. The otherclassic examples are DHL, UPS and Fedex, who all offered customers theability to go online and check the status of packages that were beingdispatched. This gave them tremendous strategic advantage. In this caseIT planning needs substantial effort, and needs to be linked closely toorganizational strategy.‘Strategic’ organizations such as banks and insurance companies arethose in which innovative applications development brings significantcompetitive advantage and day-to-day processes are highly dependenton the smooth running of IT systems. In these types of organization, thereis a very tight link between business strategy and IT strategy, and thehead of IT normally sits on the board of directors.Developing guiding principlesHow do senior managers ensure that IT investmentdecisions are in line with the organization’slong-term strategy? The answer may be todevelop a set of guiding principles which governIT investment decisions.The ‘principles’ approach to IT is advocated byDavenport. He recommends that a task force isset up comprising from 5 to 10 senior managers,including a senior information systems person,together with a small group of IS managers. Thisgroup should begin to devise a set of guiding principles that link strategyto IT investment decisions. The senior managers act as sponsors later inthe process, endorsing the principles devised by the group.286