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

The applicationsSambamurthy and Zmud (in Sauer and Yetton, 1997) say:In our experience the most valued IT management skills tend to requirelengthy development periods as they are heavily dependent on local – forexample organization-specific – knowledge. We have also found that not allfirms are equally endowed with the most valuable IT management skills.Furthermore, in order to be effectively applied, a firm’s IT management skillsmust be intricately woven into the complex milieu of an organization’s structures,roles, processes, culture, and the many relationships among a firm’sbusiness and IT managers.In today’s organizations the responsibility for managing IT is widelydispersed. It no longer sits solely with the IT director, but is shared amonggroup-level IT people, business-level IT people, business line management,vendors, partners, consultants and contractors. This web of interconnectedindividuals somehow needs to sustain the organization’s ability to innovate,plan, design, develop, implement, integrate and maintain IT systems.So what are the unique skills and knowledge areas required by an organizationcollectively to ensure that IT is used to improve businessprocesses, enable changes in organizational structure, add value to itsknowledge base and create or support the development of new productsand services? Sambamurthy and Zmud carried out a four-year researchprogramme in the early 1990s, out of which emerged seven categories ofIT management competencies:• Business deployment. The key competences in this area are theability to examine, visualize and communicate the value offered byemerging IT. This needs to be coupled with the use of multidisciplinaryteams, with a good shared understanding of IT, to rapidlyimplement innovative IT solutions.• External networks. This area of competence refers to the need for theorganization to develop close partnerships with external parties toincrease their awareness of emerging IT.• Line technology leadership. Users such as line managers and seniormanagers need to participate actively in championing IT initiatives.This area of competence concerns the ability to take technical leadership,which line managers may delegate rather too quickly to ITpeople through lack of understanding of the technology.288