IT Change Management Research Articles

Enhancing IT Change Management through Communities of Practice and Social Learning: A Case Study at a University

Enhancing IT Change Management through Communities of Practice and Social Learning: A Case Study at a University

A FUZZY AHP ANALYSIS OF IT OUTSOURCING MONITORING IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS

Current literature on information technology points to a scenario where resistance to change must be considered in all IT implementation processes. However, there is no consistency in the extant literature about the interplay among the several triggers to resistance to change in IT. This paper aims at surveying the literature and investigating their roles in IT change management. Fuzzy AHP (Analytical Hierarchical Process) is used to provide greater flexibility in understanding the answers. The results point to two main sets of behaviours (intrinsic and extrinsic), which find support from other management fields. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that contrary to what was formerly believed, resistance to change in IT is not as much linked to technical aspects but to personal and team-level causes. As a methodological contribution a weighting scheme to fuzzy AHP is introduced, to cope with varying degrees of information across teams, in order to add an improvement in the method used, aiming at a better precision in the results.

Resistance in processes of change in information technology: a Fuzzy AHP approach

Current literature on information technology points to a scenario where resistance to change must be considered in all IT implementation processes. However, there is no consistency in the extant literature about the interplay among the several triggers to resistance to change in IT. This paper aims at surveying the literature and investigating their roles in IT change management. Fuzzy AHP (Analytical Hierarchical Process) is used to provide greater flexibility in understanding the answers. The results point to two main sets of behaviours (intrinsic and extrinsic), which find support from other management fields. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that contrary to what was formerly believed, resistance to change in IT is not as much linked to technical aspects but to personal and team-level causes.

The perspective of national ERP vendors in achieving ERP project success in government organisations: a case of Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore Key Influencing Factors (KIFs) from the perspective of national ERP vendors throughout pre-implementation and during implementation of ERP projects. We conducted a mixed methods study on 10 national ERP vendors involved in government sector projects in Saudi Arabia. KIFs were identified through in-depth interviews and prioritised using a multi-criteria decision analysis method. Findings suggested a list of KIFs that are grouped into four main categories namely sponsors and leadership, IT capabilities, change management and project management. The prioritisation of the KIFs reveals the ERP capabilities and the stakeholder managers to be the most important factors.

ITIL process management to mitigate operations risk in cloud architecture infrastructure for banking and financial services industry

Banking and Financial Services Corporations need to update information systems with logic and data of various applications on everyday basis to remain consistent with change in economy and business activity. This helps to work with latest information included in information system available in current economic and business scenario. This enables information systems and empowers work force to complete tasks in rapidly changing flow of monetary resources. With several employees in Banking and Financial Services Corporations using cloud infrastructure and reporting incidents arising in using cloud infrastructure, it is of prime importance to fix incidents reported within specific timelines. IT change management process is followed in order to adhere to IT governance & compliance framework and reduce risk of failure while performing changes in cloud infrastructure. With incident management and change management processes are aligned to keep cloud infrastructure available and secure, they become integral part of IT operations everyday activity. To make ITIL processes efficient, further organization specific policies are developed. With global standards and organization level controls in place, there are failures in IT incident and change management processes and implementation. In this paper, we have identified the risk arising due to incident management and change management processes that lead to emergency changes being implemented on cloud infrastructure architecture and discussed the steps to mitigate risks to bring greater responsibility and accountability for cloud services providers.

A framework for risk assessment based on analysis of historical information of workflow execution in IT systems

Services provided by modern organizations are usually designed, deployed, and supported by large-scale IT infrastructures. In order to obtain the best performance out of these services, it is essential that organizations enforce rational practices for the management of the resources that compose their infrastructures. A common point in most guides and libraries of best practices for IT management – such as ITIL or COBIT – is the explicit concern with the risks related to IT activities. Proactively dealing with adverse and favorable events that may arise during everyday operations might prevent, for example: delay on deployment of services, cost overrun in activities, predictable failures of handled resources, and, consequently, waste of money. Although important, risk management in practice usually lacks in automation and standardization in IT environments. Therefore, in this article, we introduce a framework to support the automation of some key steps of risk management. Our goal is to organize risk information related to IT activities providing support for decision making thus turning risk response planning simpler, faster, and more accurate. The proposed framework is targeted to workflow-based IT management systems. The fundamental approach is to learn from problems reported in the history of previously conducted workflows in order to estimate risks for future executions. We evaluated the applicability of the framework in two case studies both in IT related areas, namely: IT change management and IT project management. The results show how the framework is not only useful to speed up the risk assessment process, but also to assist the decision making of project managers and IT operators by organizing risk detailed information in a comprehensive way.

Scheduling-capable autonomic manager for policy-based IT change management system

Managing large IT environments is expensive and labour intensive. Maintaining and upgrading with minimal disruption and administrative support has always been a challenging task for system administrators. One challenge faced by IT administrators is arriving at schedules for applying one or more change requests to one of the system components. Most of the time, the impact analysis of the proposed changes is done by humans and is often laborious and error-prone. Although this methodology might be suitable to handle changes that are planned way ahead in time, it is completely inappropriate for changes that need to be done sooner. In addition, such manual handling does not scale well with the size of the IT infrastructure. In this article, the focus is on the problem of scheduling change requests in the presence of organisational policies governing the use of its resources. The authors propose two approaches for change management scheduling and present the implementation details of two prototypes that prove the feasibility of the proposed approaches. Their implementation is integrated with an autonomic manager which they had described in their earlier work.

Evolution of collaborative distance work at ITESM: structure and process

Evolution of collaborative distance work at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, ITESM, is discussed and analyzed. ITESM’s location, geographic distribution, organizational structure, development strategies and recent expansion throughout the Americas are described. The evolution of the institution’s networking capability from a national and intra‐institutional network of 26 campuses to a complex array of over a thousand inter‐institutional entities of various kinds across the continent is reconstructed. This evolution is reviewed in light of ITESM’s pursuit of an aggressive transformation strategy that includes a shift towards distributed and participative teaching as well as a strong outward‐looking, international approach. The paper discusses some relationships between the deployment of an IT platform and change management of core university processes. Some lessons are drawn from ITESM’s experience, concluding with the unavoidable challenge the higher education establishment faces worldwide to redefine itself as an instrument designed for the knowledge society.