IT and organisational change

This document outlines the impact of ICT-induced organisational change in England in the three sectors of HE, FESR and Schools. The overall objective of the report is to find and document ways of bringing about step change in the educational sector.

The aims of the report  are as follows:
1. Identify and develop successful models of organisation-level change management, local ownership and demand-led approaches that embed effective use of technology to support learning.
2. Clarify the related issues of the knowledge, skills and understanding needed by leaders of educational institutions

The purpose of this thesis is to explore—from a managerial perspective—how IT-enabled change is designed, led, and sustained from-within an organisation. This is an issue of central concern because there is a considerable lack of research that directly incorporates IT in management and organisational change studies. In addition, earlier research has recurrently focused on abstract theorising, aggregated perspectives, and exploring organisational change from the outside, from-without. Consequently, the present body of research provides limited knowledge of how organisations in practice lead large-scale IT-enabled transformations. The thesis herein sets out to explore this question, and does so by following the change designers and agents of the telecommunications company Ericsson, that transformed its finance and accounting unit from a highly decentralised structure into a shared service centre structure (SSC) entitled: “The Global F&A Transformation Programme”. The formal transforma...

Wikipedia and e-democracy projects have in common the establishment of a mass-scale decision process. The Wikipedian method to discuss and reach consensus is described in this article by Sylvain Firer-Blaess, using the theoretical frame of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. Can this method be applied to various e-democracy projects? In part, provided that building a free encyclopedia is not the same as living the life of the city.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to Web 2.0 and its gradual adoption in public services and governance. Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of Web-based communities, networks and hosted services, which facilitates interaction between users. Since the invention of the concept of Web 2.0 version numbering has been attached to various activities and organizations, including government. Government 2.0 opens a horizon towards post-modern governance, in which government utilizes in its governance and stakeholder relations open and pluralist interactivity, community-centeredness and citizens’ own content production and networking, following the logic of Web 2.0. The promise of Government 2.0 lies in the idea that the more direct citizen involvement there is in public affairs in Web 2.0 style, the more reason there is for people to take a constructive view of public policies, governance and organizations.

A Digital Transformation fundamentally involves the implementation of one or more digital tools, which is a process often burdened with challenges. It is estimated that approximately 66 to 84 percent of the taken Digital Transformation initiatives are unsuccessful, which can be attributed to organizational shortcomings, more specifically structural ones. While public organizations regularly do not achieve the same success as those in the private sector, it was of interest to investigate the Swedish ones. Where 86 percent of residents use the internet to interact with public authorities. Previous research has singled out the IT organization to be the appointed leader of Digital Transformations, further research on that relationship is limited. Therefore, this study examines how the IT organization, in an agile environment, can align its structure for a successful Digital Transformation. To answer the discovered research problem, the following research question has been formulated: “How should an IT organization’s structure be aligned in an agile environment in order to achieve a successful Digital Transformation?”.

A conceptual framework could be produced through a literature review, illustrating the alignment of the three IT organizational structures to achieve metrics that were considered to result in a successful Digital Transformation. The study uses a qualitative approach and to answer the research question a case study was applied as the research strategy. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data for later analysis in accordance with the applied thematic analysis technique. The result showed that all four participating public organizations applied different alignment strategies, even though the same metrics were fully or partially measured. In conclusion, a majority of the organizations aligned their structure by establishing or appointing a smaller unit, separate from the IT organization, responsible for leading the Digital Transformation. Furthermore, the said units were structurally decentralized and more self-governing in contrast to the structurally centralized or federal IT organization.

The last few years have seen a notable increase in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in Higher Education (HE), both in the context of distance learning and on-campus teaching and learning (McConnell, 1999). It is argued that market forces make it vital for institutions to harness technological opportunities to fulfil their strategic mission and provide economic advantage. Fox & Hermann (2000) point out the staff development implications: “teachers are [...] reluctant to take up the challenges to use the new online media. Some have deep-rooted concerns about changes in work practices, and others see the huge gap between the rhetoric surrounding technology and the realities of educational settings, while others boldly embrace new media with seemingly little critical pedagogical concern.”

Promoting e-learning can be straightforward if staff developers ‘go with the grain’ of their own institution, working with specific educational processes or technologies that lecturers are known to be interested in (Dempster & Blackmore, 2002). However, embedding e-learning practices is not so simple. Whilst IT infrastructure and tools appropriate to the educational objectives are essential (Dempster, 2002), the process of engaging staff to make educationally sound changes to their teaching practice requires a sophisticated understanding of curriculum development and change processes. For technology is not pedagogically neutral. It can enhance and sustain dominant practices such as lecturing, or it can disrupt and transform them (Garrison & Andersen, 2000).

88 Education development and leadership in higher education 6 Alignment and synergy: leadership and education development Margot Pearson and Chris Trevitt INTRODUCTION Much of the discussion about management and leadership in universities in Australia, the USA and ...

... In this sense, it was positioned by CEDAM as an 'experiment' in institutional learning. Institutional context. There are some who would argue that The ANU is a comparatively well-resourced research-intensive institution. However ...

This article explores what it is that managers actually do to successfully lead IT-enabled change. It is based on a three-year case study of the practice of leading IT-enabled change inside the global telecommunications company Ericsson. The organization managed to successfully change their finance and accounting (F&A) department from an independent structure of numerous local F&A organizations with their own information systems and their own way of doing things into one interdependent global network of shared service centers enabled by a single information system. The findings from the case study are combined with recent research and elevated into the “Commonality Framework for IT-Enabled Change”, which explains how such change can be driven in practice.