What are the risks associated with business and IS/IT change?

The company that I have visited was the Lane Systems. Lane System is actively promoting IT development in the Philippines and is closely working with government agencies in building solutions for small-medium enterprises (SMEs) and encouraging them to automate their business processes. It is exists to provide an ever-increasing level of quality software, consulting, service and responsiveness to the customers for very reasonable costs, while creating a corporate culture that fosters respect, personal growth, responsibility and opportunities for their employees. Moreover, Lane System is also unique in several aspects; among them is the unparalleled ability to examine a business challenge, apply appropriate technology solutions, and effectively articulate the solution to their own teams and the customer from start to finish. They guarantee the customers’ satisfaction as they go the “extra mile” to see that their customers know that they mean business when they say they are committed to them.

That’s why, because of being committed to their job they have also encountered to have some changes/resource policies in their systems and they’ve developed it, in order to have more improvements on their performance so that the customers would also be satisfied and contended with their works and will keep working with them too. However, changing systems is also not easy to do, it is neither very complicated nor very difficult to handle because there’s so many things that you have to consider before systems are built and tested, like the risks of change. And that’s what they had experienced too like controlling the integrity of information systems and resources, including all network devices, computer systems, applications, and databases in their infrastructure. By the way, here are some of the purposes why some organizations plan to change.

The Purpose of Change:

The purpose of organizational transformation and business reengineering was to change radically how the organization behaved. The organizational transformation needs the reappraisal and redesign of business processes to create dramatic organizational performance improvements.

And the desire to make such fundamental changes in organizations is driven by three major aims:

1. The need for an inbuilt capability for detecting and responding to changing circumstances.
2. To obtain economic benefits as a result of streamlined operations and increased customer satisfaction.
3. To achieve higher employee benefits which directly benefit the two other aims.

Information is more critical in organizations as change and uncertainty increase. IT is an important enabler and integrator of various different business units within an organization. However, information is not being exploited to its full potential. Therefore, information must be managed strategically and no corporate strategy can be considered complete without taking IT concerns into account.


Moreover, as I have searched, in organizations without a formal information technology (IT) change management process, it is estimated that 80% of IT service outage problems are caused by updates and alterations to systems, applications, and infrastructure. Consequently, one of the first areas to address to improve service reliability is to track all changes and systematically manage change with full knowledge of the risks of the change and the potential organizational impact. Change Management is an essential part of the overall process to ensure the reliable delivery of information technology services. Nevertheless, before implementing the changes, they should also have a risk assessment for them to know the possible risks of change and have some reviews that commensurate with the potential impact of the change.

The Risks of Change:

For determining composite risk assessment that guides the implementation of the change they can have a two standardized evaluations: the organizational criticality of the system to be changed and the likelihood of adverse impact resulting from the change. First, on an annual basis, the criticality of the system is appraised in order to establish its relative value to the enterprise. The standardized criteria for this assessment are:

Number of users that could be impacted by a service interruption
Financial impact of an extended service outage or unrecoverable loss of data
Likelihood that a system/service failure could result in:
Disclosure of sensitive information that needs to be protected
Misuse of client-owned resources
Malicious interruption of services or research operations
Possibility that a system/service failure could result in an event or condition that may have adverse safety, health, security, operational, environmental, or mission implication
Potential future impacts based on prior system/service interruption experiences

Secondly, when a change is proposed, each request is graded against the following criteria:

How many users will be visibly affected by the proposed change?
What is the anticipated difficulty for user and support personnel to learn the new or modified system/service?
What is the stability and supportability of the technology or vendor products utilized by the system?
In the event the change implementation fails or adversely impacts other systems or services, what will be the impact of executing the implementation contingency plan?
Based upon past experience, what is the likelihood of failure or adverse problems resulting from the change?


Depending on the level of the composite risk, requirements of the release plan such as testing rigor and end-user communications are strengthened to mitigate higher levels of risk. Conversely, a lower risk score results in a reduced scope of change implementation requirements.


Furthermore, there are also four characteristics of a transformed organization, these are:

1. A vision that is shared throughout the business:

Everyone in the organization has the same views of how things in the organization could be. Thus, great emphasis is placed on accurate and detailed communication to develop this perspective.

2. The priority for satisfying customers’ needs:

Giving the customers what they want when they want it is the major priority in any transformed organization.

3. The high priority of satisfying staff needs:

An important aim in a transformed organization is providing employees with benefits they see as positive that contribute to the aims and objectives of the organization.

4. The vital nature of the effective management of change:

In any changing organization, emphasis must be placed on the management of change skills and responsibilities. Resistance to change must be incorporated and time must be allowed for people to adapt to the changes made.


In my research, I have found out that the contribution of IT to organizational transformation was that some organizations found information system and information technology to be crucially important while in other organizations was considerably less important. So therefore, information’s intensity determines the contribution of IT. That information intensity refers to how important information is to the overall organization.



References:
• http://www.nwacc.org/programs/awards/excellence_award/pnnl_submissions_07/pnnl_risk-based_it_change_management.pdf
• http://emhain.wit.ie/~pwall/CvD.htm
• http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/courses/01388/index.asp?code=01388&pg=all