Change Management is the least efficient process in the modern enterprise. It's where everything grinds to a halt and business value is lost - change management processes are the rate limiter for enterprise agility.

This paper identifies the challenges of making change from a systems perspective and highlights the role technology can play in enabling real-time change by process participants so they can optimize for organizational goals rather than slavishly follow procedures.

Problem

In today’s increasingly dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt to survive. Ironically, change management has become a major bottleneck. Inefficient offline reviews are disconnected from daily operations and unresponsive to evolving requirements. Organizations’ need a practical mechanism for managing controlled variance and change in-flight to break the logjam.

Rigid operations are anti-social! They are emblematic of non-responsive bureaucracies best captured by the Dilbert comic series.

Fixed procedures alienate people from their work, squandering human ingenuity. According to Deloitte’s Center for the Edge [1], 80% of employees are unengaged at work!

Following a linear process regardless of circumstances is nonsensical. We can’t anticipate all scenarios; an unrelated chain of events can impact best laid plans.

Rather than focusing on standard procedures, people need the authority to flexibly meet corporate objectives. People need to be able to respond to the environment, to adjust plans to keep goals in sight.

The scale of unleveraged human capital reveals a tremendous opportunity to tap the enterprise cognitive surplus [2]. After all, businesses are socio-technical systems. Technology may connect, automate, and report, but people are the agents of change. The Network is the People!

Solution

While the Web introduced the notion of self-directed navigation of linked content, popular social sites facilitate distributed collaboration, and consumer apps have introduced the notion of context-awareness, there hasn’t been a unified approach to Information System Agility.

To achieve a more fluid model of work it is necessary to re-think information systems architecture. Using same old methods and expecting different results is what Einstein called the definition of insanity.

We need software architecture to support a looser form of application design that is not just modular, but can be contextualized and adaptive. IT already supports distributed data and systems; it’s time to decentralize control.

Social needs to be integrated into process itself, it has to be able to direct the flow otherwise it is simply chatter that is ultimately still dependant on conventional change management schemes. Processes need to become 2-way conversations.

Enterprise Social Collaboration is not about liberation, it’s about optimizing work [3]. It’s about giving people joint-custody of their activities so they can co-author processes on-the-fly, using authorized discretion to best meet business goals in a transparent and auditable fashion.

Lean Integration is about matching system resources to business needs [4] - just the right information, at the right time, to the right people. Lean Integration leverages late-binding to ensure its response is always targeted for each interaction.

In combination the two provide for an integrated feedback loop [5] where the system both responds in context and enables process participants, based on authority, to 'negotiate' system requirements for their circumstances. This new form of 'integrated' collaboration supports real-time alignment of all stakeholders around business goals.

Practical Impact

Instead of being a subject of a fixed process, a human API, people need to be able to engage the business owners that define default requirements, and IT, which develops capabilities and maintains underlying systems, and seek in-flight approvals for changes that help them solve a problem, win or maintain a customer, or otherwise innovate for the company [6]. Dan Pink has described how such autonomy can improve job satisfaction by addressing people's “intrinsic motivations” [7].

First Steps

Reconsider fundamental challenges that limit enterprise agility.

Credits

1. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Duleesha Kulasooriya, Dan Elbert, Deloitte’s Center for the Edge Deloitte Development LLC, 2010, “The Shift Index”, Report.

2. Clay Shirky, 2010, “Cognitive Surplus”, Book.

3. Tom Davenport, Harvard Business Review, November 8, 2010, “Want Value From Social? Add Structure”, Blog.

4. David Lyle, John G. Schmidt, May 2010, "Lean Integration", Book

5. Thomas Goetz, Wired Magazine, June 19, 2011, “Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops”, Article.

6. Sameer Patel, July 7, 2011, “Why Exception Handling Should be the Rule”, Blog.

7. Daniel H. Pink, 2011, “Drive”, Book.

8. Frederick W. Taylor, 1911, “The Principles of Scientific Management”, Book.

9. Ray Wang, Constellation Group, June19, 2011, "Why Enterprise Software Sucks", Conference Presentation.

10. Tom Byrne, InformationWeek, June 02, 2011, "Enterprise 2.0 B.S. List", Article.

11. The Corporate Executive Board Company, 2010, “The Future of Corporate IT”, Report

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