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

IT-based process changedecision-making process in an organization. They become mere ‘implementers’of other people’s solutions. IT management skills need to bepresent not only within IT departments, but all over the organization.IT people need to learn more about organizational change processes. ITpeople have been traditionally uninterested in anything except technology,which has led to a division between designing the IT system (IT’sresponsibility) and realizing the benefits by getting people to use it well(business managers’ responsibility). This is changing, but not fast enough.IT people now need to shift their competency from being technicalexperts, to being specialists with change management skills.Human-oriented processes for implementing IT systems work betterthan processes that have a purely technical focus, and incremental processchange has a better record of success than radical process change.Excitement about ‘radical’ process change has led to a belief that onlyradical changes bring radical results. BPR (business process re-engineering)has not brought all the hoped-for benefits, because of its lack offocus on people and the inherently risky nature of radical process transformation.It is highly probable that incremental, more human-oriented solutionssuch as those based on socio-technical design actually work better.If a change in information-sharing habits is required, this meansaddressing the change as you would a cultural change. Problems comewhen senior managers and IT people believe that technology will automaticallychange behaviour. Often the reverse happens: the new technologyreinforces the habits and attitudes already present. A culture change maybe required to create the shifts in information sharing required, because theintroduction of new IT systems alone will not achieve this.Chief executives have started to over-value the power of IT, beyond thestrategic gains it can really offer. IT is not now a scarce resource, but a factof life. Some say that IT’s importance has diminished, and that organizationsneed to approach IT investment and management in a verydifferent way, allowing others to experiment with new systems beforedeciding to buy, and only investing where there is vulnerability.307