“ICT provides the potential to bring about change and accerlating developments in the economy, society and e-Government concept”, stated the Deputy Secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office, Awg. Hj. Sulaiman Hj. Ismail while chairing the preparatory meeting of the 12th ASEAN Conference on Civil Service Matters (ACCSM). He added, “ There has been increasing demand that public sector have to become learner and more responsive to the needs of its constituents while improving the accessibility and quality of its service”. There has been given expectation that government services should be delivered more effectively and efficiently with elements of flexibility, creativity and innovation. So evidently, ICT plays an important role in catalyzing the socio-economic development of the country, improve information flow and processes within public organizations.

Question is does ICT or IT in fact, brings change to the organization or work place? More and more organizations today face pressure due to changing environment that, in turn, requires these organizations to adopt IT. Any literature on effective organizational design will reveal six fundamental forces that acts as stimulants for change------ the changing nature of the work force, technology, economic shocks, changing social trends, the “new” world politics, and the changing nature of competition. No doubt! One of them has a tremendous affect on the redesigning of the organization and that is “ change through technology” as we believe that changes in technology change the nature of work. The adoption of new technologies such as computers, microfilming record management and retrieval, graphics, telecommunications systems (including Internets, Intranets and Extranets) robotics, and flexible manufacturing operation to the new way of doing business through E-Commerce (Electronic Commerce or Internet business) and more advancement in M-Commerce (mobile commerce through mobile phones and PDS) have a profound impact on the organizations that adopt them regardless of the classification of type (private or public sector) or size of the organizations.

Behavioral scientists have long worked on the philosophy of the change management and agree that ‘’Change is to make things different’. They are in a view that in order to bring an effective and planned change in the organization there needs to be a change agent or driver for the change. It can be a person or group of persons who act as catalysts and assumes the responsibility for managing change activities. Nevertheless, some time organization structure, technology and people can be main drivers for change. We will focus mainly on how changing technology encompasses modifications in the way work is processed and in the methods and equipments used.
Most of the early studies in management and organizational behavior dealt with efforts aimed at technological change. In today’s work environments tremendous change was brought-in with the introduction of automation and computerization, and it has not only revolutionized the work environment and work practice but has tremendous impact on the daily routine-life of the user. The change in technology has reshaped the business process reengineering. The office of 1993 is dramatically different from its counterpart of 1983 and of course offices in 2003 that gave them a complete new look. Paperless office will soon be an integral part of working of the organizations.

IT As Agent
In many cases, IT has become such an essential tool of the job that it has changed the whole nature of the business in the form of business-to-business (B2B), business-to-customer (B2C) and customer-customer (C2C) form of electronic commerce and electronic data interchange (EDI). A new concept in the enterprise-wide resource planning (EWRP or ERP) business methodology and supply change management has developed a new business era. This is basically a new way the business domains are setting up to differentiating their products. Instead of relying on experience and specialist knowledge, the business is using service and customers care with value-added through the use of technology to help achieve competitive advantage. Most of the business tycoons understand that technology has moved from the background to the foreground as a means of getting competitive advantages. The re-skilling of jobs puts more emphasis on customer care rather than in-depth product knowledge, because one can get the detailed knowledge from the computer systems. So it is the skill that needs to be demonstrated more. IT has reshaped the working with the financial data. The quality of decision making has improved and efficiency of the people are judged by the way they use the data. IT has also allowed businesses to be geographically split (global village) and allowing people to work at home and in the field (Teleworkers). Indeed, such is the influence and power of IT that companies are being pushed into “improving paradox”-to improve their services simply because they can-how many house buyers, for instance, really need to have their mortgage applications confirmed within fifteen minutes, as banks like Citibank promise? This is where IT is adding values to the end-users.

Businesses are, rightly, walking up to the idea that information is a major resource. But this involves sharing that information as widely as possible, so it can no longer remain the ‘property’ of one department. This idea was the base for “client/server” environment a corporate information resource tapped into almost at will from a desktop show signs of becoming a reality. With the overwhelming success of client-server environment the new wave of technically qualified personnel emerged to manage the networking.


IT as Catalyst
The wide availability of information put a question mark that do organizations really need any ’middle’ to the managers. Traditionally, the middle managers are to précis information and pass it upwards for decision-making. This really do not make a room for the middle manager but this trend isn’t solely a result of IT, but IT has acted as catalyst, especially with the emergence of Executive Information Systems (EIS). IT can also be a catalyst in understanding the business as a whole, and ways in which it could be improved. The relationship between IT people and the users they serve is changing, too. The role of IT department has changed from centralized to decentralized and more as service providers. But unfortunately, in performing these services sometimes IT expenditure becomes so high and out of control that to quantify the real benefits become so gloomy that organizations comes in the doldrums of the technological thrusts. This is most often experienced with IT in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) or micro organizations.

IT as Barrier
As it says that there are two sides of a coin that is true to IT. Information Technology is blessing on one side and a disguise on the other side. So we can precisely say that while IT is often the change agent or catalyst of change, it can be a barrier, too. We have heard a loss of power supply resulting billion dollars loss due to failure in IT circuits. We have also heard of the building societies that couldn’t merge because their IT systems were incompatible or trading partners who could not trade because their computer could not talk to each other due to network failure. Another biggest issue was faced in year 2000 with Y2K bugs. Every day businesses are jeopardizing due to new and new viruses. This has made it virtually impossible to manage the integrity and availability of information. Millions of dollars were wasted due to the poorly designed information systems and lack of proper project managements. Globally IT is facing with the severe threats in the form of digital divide and becoming harder for the poor nations to justify the expenditure on IT.

Solutions
The result is that many companies are now facing the “iceberg problem’. The business is seen as a huge mass with great inertia, difficult to maneuver and too slippery to get a proper grip on. The key issue is to face up to change, with all its inconveniences, and understand how and why it is happening. This means acknowledging that it is needed, recognizing that it can provide positive opportunities, and believing that it is really possible.

The one piece of good news is, whether change is reactive or proactive, business driven or technology driven, as the management skills required for successful implementation IT solution is one of the most fundamental questions to answer.

How to reap the benefits
One of the most important and essential prerequisite is “Commitment”. This is the fundamental aspect of any change drive within the organizations. Change requires a lot of people’s time, usually on top of their full time job running the existing system, which must continue until the new one is ready to be implemented. “ Almost everybody underestimates the amount of resources and length of time it’ll take to make a change”, said one of the training directors of largest pharmaceutical groups Ciba Geigy. It further emphasizes the role of CEOs as leaders. CEOs could make things easier for themselves if, before embarking on complex performance-improvement program with the diffusion of new technology, they determined the extent of the change required to achieve the business outcomes they seek.

Another very tedious and demanding element for change is managing people and unfortunately this is most forgotten or least considered driver of change. The companies are willing to invest millions of dollars on hardware, and software but when it comes to peopleware, they spend as little as of 2% of their revenue on managing and training people who are considered assets for any business. We don’t need a computer expert to tell the CEO that most important and difficult thing to manage is to manage people. However, as we said that the technical and other inanimate problems of installing information technology are often so daunting, that little efforts is spent on those whose support is crucial to its success, the users. Communication and consultation are the key word. Communication needs to be a two-way process. Not only can end user make a big contribution to the efficient and effective design of a system, they need to have their say, if they have no new ideas to add. A managing director of consulting firm specializing in change management described his experience about a company that installed an electronic mail system, and promptly informed all its employees by sending them an e-mail message on the system they didn’t know was there.

Nevertheless, we must understand that any technological change in an organization is always worrying for staff and most of these have technology phobia or anxiety that makes difficult for them to adopt the technology. So as an agent of change work out the details-salary changes, job structure, and redundancies etc- as early as possible, and then tell people. I still remember the word of Senior Executive Vice President of National Bank that managing change is all about managing the rumors and panic that precede it. Writer has several examples of his IT experience of over two decades in the four different countries that at the beginning the end-user do not welcome the technology and associated technological changes due to nonexistence of computer or IT non self-efficacy. Training can be another effective way to improve computer self-efficacy and reducing the computer anxiety. We should focus on proactive approach of training. Particular attention should be given to brand new skills connected with computerized systems such as data management, data warehouse or network management. If training is the practical side of the system, educating people in the culture of the new system is also important-and should be extended to directors and managers as well as operators and end users. Building new teams and re-assessing people’s skills is part of process, too. It’s no good assuming things will just go on the way they were, or that people will still be suited to doing the same job. I remember one very effective approach adopted during delivering and installing a microfilming system to a Saudi American Bank in Riyadh. I told the user manager: “This systems is being done primarily for you. I am not going to do it unless you manage it.” That worked tremendously to be effective. So the key is involve users, train them on job and remove their grievances.

Conclusively, working with change that IT brings to the organization, we should keep in mind that change management will not be effective if it does not brings significant change in the attitudes and behavior of all the personals from CEOs to the dispatch clerk in the organization. The change will only be affective if it brings change in the behavior to adopt the technology. Behavioral scientists have worked a lot on the various theories to change attitude and behavior of the end user towards adopting the technology. Every organization committed to bring change due to the technology adoption must select its own action plan to successfully implement the change management program.


 

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