Change needs to be properly managed - With aid of examples, discuss the factors which influence the management of change within organisations"

Referring to the survival of organisations in this turbulent environment, Tom Peters states, “No skill is more important than the corporate capacity to change per se.  The company’s most urgent task then is to learn to welcome – beg for, demand – innovation from everyone.  Constant change by everyone requires a dramatic increase in the capacity to accept disruption” 

Throughout Peters’ writing he stresses the needs for organisations and those employed within them to face up to the fact that, and as Bennett says, “Change is inevitable” Bennett goes on to qualify his remark with the rider that “the problem is how best to harness change and use its consequences for the benefit of the organisation”

Changes in both the external and internal environment of an organisation can impact upon it and in some cases cause devastation.  For example, the move from typewriters to Word Processing involved an often traumatic shift of attitude and self-perception amongst employees from a “mechanical” orientation where hard copy and paper based systems under the control of an individual dominated, to a system where a complete new skill-set was required and where control was seen as being vested in the computer and even the terminology and materials handled were different to those that had been in use for over a century.  

New possibilities opened up with the advent of the Word Processor but a “Luddite” mentality prevailed in many organisations amongst management and workers each uncomfortable with both the reasons behind change and the speed at which the change was occurring.

Peters in Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations commenting on the pace of change in technology cites MCI’s head of strategy and technology, Dick Leibhaber who said “New developments in telecommunications seem to come about twice a day”  (It is the writers’ belief that six years since Leibhaber made that statement, the rate of change continues to increase) and as Bocij notes, “The prediction of Gordon Moore the co-founder of Intel that transistor density of semiconductor chips would double every 18 months has actually happened” 

It is “because of the inherent instability in the business environment today, organizations often find themselves facing the need to change their mode of operation” opines Bloodgood and Salisbury  In their paper they suggest that organisations have four ways of dealing with change that have a direct bearing upon those who work in the company.  Using the Resource-Based View of an organisation they conclude that there is, firstly, the option to reconfigure existing resources (either people, structure, finance, plant, equipment and premises); secondly, to reconfigure but with new resources; thirdly, to acquire new resources without reconfiguring and lastly to adopt a “business as usual” strategy with or without minor modifications.  

In a similar way Bennett outlines a number of issues relating to organisational change with regard to technology and innovation.  These are the definition and identification of the operational changes needed; the identification of attitudes and perspectives held by employees; the shifts of attitudes and perspectives required to adapt well to the changing environment and working methods and the development of implementation methods designed to change existing attitudes.  He goes on to suggest that to achieve the changes required it is necessary to introduce a series of measures including the alteration of technologies and retaining; altering structures, functions and accountability; altering tasks and the division of labour and solving the human problems associated with the above.

New technology has the potential to reverse the trend caused by previous technologies that involved “mass production”, - “any colour as long as its black” to a bespoke popular car – (indeed the computer I am using to type this essay is configured to my own specifications and is almost certainly unique in the world) from “mass marketing” – “one size fits all” to tailor-made products and services, and from “mass media” to “target audiences”.  Individuals are no longer constrained by travel to earn a living; they can work from their rural idyll or dockside loft rather than the “dark satanic mill” or its modern equivalent the call centre!  These advances allow such people to work when they want to and to be within easy reach of a world-wide audience at the touch of a button – 24 hours a day if need be - in the “global village” envisaged to by Marshall McLuhan in 1964.

According to the UK’s Labour Force Survey in Spring 2001, almost 1.7 million people worked at or from home in the UK for at least one full day per week in their main job, many as a consequence of new technology offered by PC’s, the Internet and e-mail.  Queen’s School of Business, Kingston, a University in Canada now offers an MBA Programme at 21 locations across Canada through Video Conferencing, The Web and high-speed communication links.  Moorehouse-Black, a company based in Hythe offer “A Level” courses to students across the UK in much the same way across real-time video links.  The relationship begins to take on a virtual perspective.

The all-pervasive technology that now surrounds IT and IS has however produced some adverse effects as noted by the response by workers to Electronic Performance Monitoring (EPM).  In Stanton and Julian’s work they state that opponents of such monitoring believe that levels of conflict increased, quantity increased at the expense of quality and that relationships and health deteriorated.

N Caroline Daniels puts the case, in its most simple terms, for pro-active management and the establishment of extensive training when new technology is introduced “ The most effective implementations of business IT occur within a programme of planned (my italics) change.  IT is changing the function of every job”

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