Change Management Critique

Too much onus put on IT department

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Change management, the business of helping companies ease the pain of transformation, may itself need an overhaul — especially when the change involves new information systems. "IT-related change management is usually, as we say in Texas, a 'barbed wire fix,'" says Dr. Dutch Holland, chairman of Holland & Davis LLC, in Houston.

Holland defies the convention of IT departments managing IT change. It doesn't make sense, he explains, because IT is about the only place this sort of thing happens. If a chemical manufacturer, for example, builds a new plant, the business case for the plant is made before any concrete is poured. And when the plant is completed, you don't have the folks who built it showing the line manager how to operate it. "That line manager had better be ready to flip the switch and start making money for the company," says Holland. "Otherwise the unemployment index goes up one notch."

Holland says this is the other, seldom-told half of the change management story. "Gartner, for example, talks about change management as though everyone agrees what it is and who does it." The commonly accepted definition consists of exhaustive communication and training. Often missing are the elements of altering work processes, work process training, and ensuring that users want, need, and will fully utilize the new system when deployed.

It sounds straightforward, but Mark Vayda, senior vice president for the Oracle practice at BearingPoint Inc., says change management is still the biggest challenge when it comes to building new ERP systems for his clients. "In the past, we saw so many great systems fail for the simple reason that there was not sufficient user buy-in."

Holland says shifting the burden of change management from IT to the business side will facilitate user buy-in, a point he thinks is often glossed over by analyst firms.

But Matt Hotle, analyst with Gartner Inc., says his organization's view on change management is not so different from Holland's. "I think we are in fairly violent agreement on this," says Hotle, "however, it would be a mistake to think you can just have the business side throw a project over the wall to IT, and then expect IT to throw the system back. You end up with a Dilbert cartoon scenario then."

— Mark Leon

Mark Leon [mrleon@usfca.edu] has been reporting on business and technology for the last seven years.

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