Vision and Organizational Change - Essay Example

Organizational Change Organizational Change by use of IT Markus (2004) describes the use of information technology as a driver of organizational change. In the journal he asserts that companies should have a vision of management the technological change in restructuring as a strategy in achieving effectiveness. He gives an example of AlliedSignal Aerospace whose vision was to bring change in the way customers related with its salespeople by improving sharing of information and this could only be achieved by using IT.

Previously, the company had forty different products and four autonomous business units all dealing with customers differently but not sharing information (Markus, 2004). Consequently, the large customers had to contact over 50 salespeople at the company and this did not make the experience worthwhile. The company envisioned that to achieve their vision organizational change was inevitable and therefore they needed to change their IT platform since previously the company never used to have a common platform for their technology.

Therefore, the company started their organizational change by using customer resource management (CRM) (Markus, 2004). Following the implementation the CRM software, the salespeople at AlliedSignal Aerospace did not use the software. From this, Markus (2004) asserts that implementation of IT alone is not enough to achieve the desired goals. This is because the users of the system are used to the old way of doing things and therefore management to the IT is required. Realizing that the salespeople were not utilizing the IT to help the company achieve its vision, the company brought in CRM manager who coached these people on how to use the system.

A vision in this company acts as explanatory variable to understand whether a change is succeeding or failing. Observation that sharing of information had not improved following implementation of CRM acted as an indicator that the change was on its way to failure and therefore coaching in using the IT. A manager reading through the journal would learn that it is not just enough to bring in a new IT application into a company but this must be backed by retraining of the staff who are to use the software.

ReferenceMarkus, L., (2004). Technochange management: Using IT to drive organizational change. Journal of Information Technology 19, 4-20; doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000002