Managing change in IT improvement initiatives.

• Author: Harris, James

Over the last decade, many governments have sought out enterprise-wide financial and human resource systems (commonly known in the technology industry as "ERP" systems) with the expectation that these systems would reduce costs by improving inefficient business processes. Unfortunately, far too many of these governments have been disappointed when their multi-million dollar technology investments have not yielded the desired outcomes. In most cases, the problem lies not in the technology itself, but rather in the cultural and institutional norms of the organization. If these norms are resistant to organizational improvement efforts, as they often are, they will undermine any process improvement initiative, including ERR

Governments are beginning to understand that they must expand their improvement activities to address not only the business and technical components of their organization, but also the cultural components. To accomplish this, governments have begun to incorporate change management and other organizational development tools into their improvement strategies. These tools have proven instrumental in helping governments expose, understand, and resolve the cultural challenges that cause organizations to underperform and that contribute to the failure of ERP initiatives.

This article is an introduction to the discipline of change management. We begin by explaining the inherent human challenges that change management seeks to address. The author then discusses the origins of change management and summarizes the change management roles that are common on ERP projects. The article then turns to some of the common mistakes and assumptions that are made about change management. We then provide recommended tips to maximize change management in ERP projects.

OUR NATURAL AVERSION TO CHANGE

Human beings are creatures of habit. As such, our need to do things with consistency is more intense than our desire to do things well. Most people prefer to work in organizations with an established 'status quo." Even if the work environment is blatantly inefficient, we are more inclined to accept these inefficiencies and develop "workarounds" to compensate for them than to make the changes required to fix them. This is because our efforts to improve the organization may also result in changes in organizational and job stability. Because many of us depend on our jobs for stability in other aspects of our lives, few people are willing to risk disrupting that stability for the sake of organizational improvements.

In many cases, our natural tendency to avoid "making waves" catalyzes other organizational dynamics that also suppress improvement. In their book, Reframing Organizations, social scientists Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal explain that rather than attempting to change an under-performing organizational environment people will adjust their behavior and actions to conform to the cultural norms of the organization. Over time, individuals not only learn to function within the business environment, but will seek to establish job stability and status within those organizations by exploiting the organizational inefficiencies to their advantage. This is often done through job specialization, where a person seeks to monopolize a certain business function, so that the organization is reliant on the individual for core business information or activity.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND ERP PROJECTS

How entities and people respond to change has been well researched through the social sciences, and this research has been used to develop strategies that seek to mitigate the adverse impacts of resistance to change. Change management describes the strategies and activities that support individuals, teams, and organizations through the challenges associated with change.

Increasingly, ERP implementation consultants have begun to incorporate change management...