Thursday, July 19, 2012

Why does a CIO need Organisational Change Management?

In general, Information Technology departments in companies worldwide tend to severely underestimate change management because of overwhelming preoccupation with technology.

This, very often, leads to avoidable costs resulting from poorer-than-expected adoption amongst users. Their passive and active resistance to the change (s) introduced by the IT department leads to lower realization of ROI, and to a vicious cycle of poor reputation of (a) the change and (b) thus the IT team, thus costing the firm heavily. These costs might be hidden but they are huge avoidable costs nevertheless for the business. In the past, this was not pursued by businesses, but organizations are waking up to these costs now.

Change Management can eliminate this waste through a systematic and scientific program that
(a)   engages the stakeholders
(b)   ensures organization readiness
(c)    addresses legitimate user resistance
(d)   ensures timely system support
(e)   prevents rollback, thus eliminating wasteful costs
Chief Information Officers (CIO) usher in process change, systems change and technology change to enable speed and efficiency for their business.

When the CIO ushers in change...with new technology, new applications, new infrastructure, and changes to existing applications & infrastructure, (s)he is answerable to the shareholders and management on how the user group or people in the organization react to and adopt the change.
Acceptance of the change, its full adoption, successful management of resistance and full promotion of the change from all quarters are a dream-come-true situation for a CIO.

Organizational Change Management (OCM) can play a major role in making this situation a reality for the CIO.
The secret of success of OCM is its extreme focus on the human angle, that is traditionally often ignored during technology changes. i.e., to manage changes successfully, we need to deeply understand the human impact of the change. To get the desired result, we should ensure that the manner of change is in alignment with the employees and their behavior, and indeed with the company’s culture and values. The change has to be envisioned at the level of an individual employee.

Organizations that realize that "a change that fails or succeeds depends truly on how the human impact is managed", consider OCM as critical as the change itself.
If you are a CXO, has an organization of more than 250 employees and is growing on a 35% growth annually, plans to expand across geographies, is looking for an ERP or SAP application to be introduced into your organization or has a volatile process and policy department, OCM is a MUST HAVE in this era of speed for adoption and reduction of effort, financial wastage due to resistance. :-)

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