Week 5 Project

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Change Management

IT has increased productivity in the process of manufacturing IT products as well as in retail. Wal-Mart has experienced an increase in pro�tability and productivity over the past 10 years through powerful supply chain management systems and managerial innovations. The banking industry didn’t experience any gains in productivity throughout the 1990s even though they were one of the most intensive users of IT. Corporate cost-reduction and downsizing measures have increased employee ef�ciency but have not yet led to sustained enhancements that signify genuine productivity gains. Up-to-date IT infrastructures make e-commerce investments in business performance improvements more effective.

Change Management

The process of planned organizational change should be carefully managed when building an information system. The systems analyst is a change agent in the implementation process who ensures successful organizational adaptation to new innovation or a new system.

A large percentage of IS fail to solve the problems of organizational change. The main causes of system failure are:

Lack of management support: An IS project is more likely to be perceived positively by technical information services staff and users if it has the commitment and backing of management. Managerial backing ensures that an IS project will receive suf�cient resources and funding to be successful.

Level of complexity and risk: Project structure, project size, and the level of technical expertise of the project team, and the information staff in�uence the level of project risk.

Poor management of the implementation process: There are several reasons for poorly managed projects. Slippage in projects, doubts, and failure is often not reported to the senior management. Optimism and ignorance also count a lot towards a poorly managed project. The traditional unit of measurement used by system designers to project costs of different heads is man-month. Adding personnel to projects doesn’t necessarily reduce the time required to complete a systems project. It often slows down delivery. Users need to get and stay involved in the design process of a new information system. Communication problems between designers and end users are a primary reason why all user requirements are not properly incorporated into IS and why many users are driven out of the implementation process.

Let us now discuss the important aspects of implementation of IS in the change management environment.