THE NEED
FOR IT CHANGE MANAGERS
The days of the highly specialized in-house technical IT expert or
‘geek’ are probably numbered. Many IT solutions are off-the-shelf, and the teams
of analysts and developers which used to occupy in-house IT departments are
shrinking, or being outsourced, or simply not required. IT people with change
management skills are needed now more than ever. Those IT people who can
understand technology, be aware of what is ‘out there’ and what it can do for
organizations, plus grasp how to create the changes desired by the organization
are highly valuable.
IT courses and literature both tend to focus on the acquisition of
IT skills and knowledge, or on the importance of good project management. The
goal of IT work has traditionally been to deliver a piece of finished software
to timescale and to budget, according to the
specification. Much emphasis is made on getting the specification right, getting
the right skills in place and controlling changes along the way. See Figure 8.2 which illustrates a typical
IT roll-out process. There is precious little reference to stakeholder
management or business user involvement, although it may be implicit.
The emergence of rapid development techniques allows for real-time
updating of software and flexible scoping of a project, but this approach
involves a new way of specifying and managing development of IT systems which
can be hard to establish and keep going.
IT people tend not to learn about change management. They learn to
see their job as ending when the system is delivered. This is beginning to
change in more forward-looking organizations, but is still an issue in many IT
departments, and in many software development companies and consultancies too.
IT people need to improve their skills in influencing and managing change, as
well as their understanding of how organizational change works, and the nature
of motivation and resistance in organizational systems.
The first aspect of the way the IT people work in organizations is
the role that they tend to assume when working with business clients. Block
(2000) offers a useful way of describing the three types of role that a
consultant can have when dealing with a client. This is helpful when considering
the ways in which IT people can choose to work with their clients. The three
types of role are:
-
expert role;
-
pair of hands role;
-
collaborative role.
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