IT projects as periods of organizational change

I ran across this fascinating article in Executive Briefing (Economist Intelligence Unit) titled “Mastering the three worlds of information technology” by Andrew McAfee. Why is this article so fascinating you reply? Well...

The author states that “[E]xecutives need to stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.” Since I have an obsession with change, this tweaked my interest. McAfee classifies IT into three types to “help leaders understand which technologies they must invest in as well as what they should do to maximize returns.”

1. Function IT (FIT) is “IT that assists with the execution of discrete tasks,” IT “that make[s] the execution of stand-alone tasks more efficient” such as simulators, CAD, spreadsheets, stats software, and word processing. This type of IT is capable of “enhancing experimentation capacity” and “increasing precision.” For example, I can model space planning for a new Learning Commons without leaving my desk, allowing me to see what will and won’t work.

2. “Network IT (NIT) provides a means by which people can communicate with one another” such as e-mail, IM, company blogs, company wikis. “Principle capabilities” include: “facilitating collaboration” (ad hoc teams to accomplish tasks using a wiki to facilitate communication, “allowing expressions of judgement” (egalitarian) and “fostering emergence” or the “appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions.” I’m working on a TaskForce right now that will be using a wiki to facilitate communication for its members who reside all across Canada. It is definitely a step above e-mail and represents an exponential change in capacity.

3. “Enterprise IT (EIT) is the type of IT application that companies adopt to restructure interactions among groups of employees or with business partners.” These technologies tend to be ones that are “purchased and imposed by upper management.” “Primary capabilities” include the “redesigning [of] business processes,” the “standardizing [of] work flows” and “monitoring activities and events efficiently.” At one point in our existence our ILS’ represented enterprise IT and fundamental changes. Sadly, they are outdated enterprise IT and thus the emergence of and open-source catalogue, Georgia PINES with the continuing development of modules to parallel the base/core functions of our ILS modules but are years beyond in capacity.

The implementation of the IT found in Georgia PINES represents long overdue change and change that is eagerly anticipated versus what happens in most cases, resistance to change. The implementation of an openURL resolver at our library and an ERMS for our serials, along with a corresponding move away from recording holdings in our opac is meeting with resistance. The openURL resolver and the ERMS are both part of a larger picture: independent modules when linked together represent enterprise IT. It is no longer one monolithic piece of IT representing enterprise IT and its corresponding change.

It is fascinating for me to look at change from another perspective. I’m not saying we should purposely implement new IT to engender change but perhaps it could be considered another tool in our briefcase, worth implementing if the return on investment (ROI) is present, be it a more traditional ROI such as monetary or a non-traditional change-based ROI.

McAfee, A. (2006). Mastering the three worlds of information technology. Executive briefing, Economist Intelligence Unit. Accessed November 29, 2006 at: http://www.viewswire.com/index.asp?layout=EBArticleVW3&article_id=%20421447627

on activity-based or activity-driven employees

I had a thought the other day (yes, I occasionally have these and frequently wish I didn’t). What if we divide all the people in our respective libraries into two groups: those with an impact on our relationship with the infrastructure and those who are absorbed in day-to-day activities? Why? There are those who set the patterns within which activities occur, aka those who help build the infrastructure of an organization, be it conceptual, technical, organizational, etc., and those who don’t. This division may help illustrate how your library operates based on the category into which the greater number of individuals fall, and may assist in identifying the change agents and potential change agents in your library (those who set or create patterns).

The process of associating individuals with these two categories may be problematic. Sometimes activity-driven individuals try to enforce a structure based on their activities and they sometimes successfully implement activity-based patterns. In my opinion, these activity-driven patterns are “from the ground up” and lack flexibility and a recognition of “the big picture”. They rarely speak to the mandate of the library and how their activities fit within a strategic direction or lend themselves to an established goal. I believe their approach is not the most effective way to implement structure, because it is piecemeal.

Do you see “activities” that have become entrenched your organization, activities that may even drive a section of a department, a department or the whole library? They are contained within statements such as “I am a collections librarian,” “I am an acquisitions librarian,” “I only do x.” When you ask them to describe what they do they default to a description of activities they are mandated to fulfill. Paul Levy described in his 2001 article the negative impacts resulting from a disassociation with “the bigger picture” and the corresponding people who create and modify infrastructure.

Are activity-driven people capable of becoming change agents? I believe it is possible. The difficulty, I suspect, is that the longer activity-driven people are in charge of themselves, the more difficult it is to change their culture. Ironically, they are quite correct in saying that their structure is appropriate or correct, because it is appropriate for what they want to do, especially because their locus is activity-based. How do you shift these people into change agents, less disassociated from the structure of their library? That is the million dollar question and since I’m not rich, I obviously have no correct answer at this time. I do have ideas but how to practicably implement them….

Levy, Paul F. (2001).“The Nut Island effect: when good teams go wrong” Harvard Business Review, v. 79(3), 51-59.