Project topics and materials
Get Complete Project Material File(s) Now! »
Orlikowski and Hofman’s improvisational model of change management
Orlikowski (1996) proposes a perspective on change, which she terms ‘a situated change perspective’. This perspective opposes the planned change perspective described in the previous paragraphs and explains organisational transformation to be “an on-going improvisation enacted by organizational actors trying to make sense of and act coherently in the world”, (Orlikowski, 1996:65). This perspective acknowledges that change in organisations take place on the micro-level as the people in the organisation do what they are expected to do i.e. being perceptively alert to their environments and their professions. Pettigrew and Whipp (1993) agree that to manage emergent change people activities should be linked at all levels of the organisation.
This means that organisational change is decentralised or delegated and that the role of the manager accordingly changes from a control role, to that of an enabler.
According to Orlikowski (ibid.) organisations are ‘enacted’ and members of the organisation reproduce or alter organisational properties as they act. By adjusting, accommodating and improvising in a subtle way (even unplanned or unintended), social changes can over time be ‘enacted’, which makes change part of the everyday actions in an organisation. Orlikowski (ibid.)
offers this perspective to change to complement the existing perspectives on change, as she acknowledges that organisational transformations could take place due to a diversity of reasons, such as managers enacting to implement ICT via planned or punctuated actions, but she stresses the critical role of situated change, which has for long been disregarded in studies on organisational transformation.
Orlikowski and Hofman (1997) describe deliberate change as change of which the outcome is seen to be exactly what the intension of it was on the onset. In this regard, assumptions are made about the nature of the agency, context, technology and change which fit an organisation that presumes stability. Deliberate change therefore ignores ‘emergent change’. Emergent change is described as change which can only be realised in action and which cannot be planned for or anticipated in advance (ibid.). Burnes (2009) describes emergent change as the endless adaption of the organisation to get it aligned with its environment, while Lyytinen and Newman (2008) argues that emergent change models acknowledge that a lot of changes could not be labelled as improvements, and that many changes could not be pre-planned, but they emerge and are unintended. Orlikowski (1996:65) highlight that ‘emergent change’ is predominantly important in current times as “unprecedented environmental, technological, and organizational developments facilitate patterns of organizing which cannot be explained or prescribed by appealing to a priori plans and intentions”. In this sense, contemporary organisational demands of flexibility, responsiveness, and the ability to learn, require organisational practices to deal with on-going change. Orlikowski and Hofman’s (1997) model of change management is based on two major assumptions: change is an on-going process; and not every technological and organisational change can be anticipated in advance. This means that change is seen as a process which continues, it is not an event which starts off, takes place, and eventually stops, allowing the organisation to return to a mode of stability. In contrast to this, it assumes that the organisation is never in a state of stability, but that it is always dealing with some type of change as it learns and carries out its daily activities. The model allows for three types of changes:
anticipated changes: changes which could be planned upfront and take place as was intended (these changes imply intentional action);
emergent changes: changes which are not anticipated or planned for upfront, but which emerges unexpectedly from the organisational context over time (these changes imply no intentional action);
opportunity-based changes: changes which would not be anticipated up front, but which also implies intentional action done on purpose to counteract certain events or issues or to respond to unexpected opportunities.
Important to note about these changes is that they take place in succession, but in no particular order to be determined upfront, as they interact with each other and influence each other on the go. Applying this model to an IS implementation (such as the case described in chapters 8 and 9 of this thesis) would mean that one acknowledges that it is not possible to know upfront exactly which changes are going to take affect during the implementation process, but that you accept that unexpected changes could emerge from the organisational context which then has to be responded to, as the new system is used and experience is gained with it. To make use of such a model one should have some mechanisms in place which you can use to firstly distinguish the types of changes as they occur, and secondly, respond to these changes in a successful way.
A Punctuated Socio-technical IS Change (PSIC) model
Lyytinen and Newman (2008) criticises IS change models as descriptive or prescriptive models explaining the process of change on only a single level. In doing this, these models neglect to describe the interactions that take place between multiple systems and the organisation’s environment during the change process. In contrast to this, their Punctuated Socio-technical IS Change (PSIC) model is a hybrid model which could be used to explain multifaceted change. It aims to explain the reasons for (why?) and the way in which (how?) IS change takes place and is an attempt to come up with a guide on how to build “generalizable and localized socio-technical explanations of IS change.”, (Lyytinen and Newman, 2008:590) In this regard, IS change is considered to be a complex, socio-technical and episodic phenomenon. The model addresses the following three aspects of IS change: the scope; the nature; and the content. This is done by integrating three theoretical streams: theories of multi-level systems and punctuated equilibrium; socio-technical systems theory (describing the content of the change); and process theorising.
Chapter 1: Introduction and Problem Statement
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Justification of the topic and motivation for studying the problem
1.3 Research Questions
1.4 Significance of the research and key contributions
1.5 Overview of the thesis
Chapter 2: Open Source Software (OSS)
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Open Source Software (OSS
2.3 Conclusion
Chapter 3: The Social Context of Information Systems (IS)
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Information Systems as Technical-rational systems
3.3 Information Systems as Socio-technical Systems
3.4 The Social Context of Information Systems
3.5 Conclusion
Chapter 4: Innovation Diffusion Models
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Classic diffusion/adoption models
4.3 The Human Environment Model (HEM) of diffusion
4.4 Conclusion
Chapter 5: Information Technology (IT) and Change Management
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Defining change, organisational change and change management
5.3 Change management models describing how change comes about
5.4 IS and organisational change
5.5 IS Change management models describing how change comes about
5.6 Choosing a change model to apply in this thesis
5.7 Conclusion
Chapter 6: Institutional Theory
6.1 Introduction
6.2 The Main Components of Institutional Theory
6.3 Institutional theory and organisations
6.4 Institutional Theory and Information Systems
6.5 Conclusion
Chapter 7: An Interpretive Longitudinal Case Study
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Research Paradigm
7.3 Research Strategy: Case Study Research
7.4 Research Design
7.5 Mode of Analysis
7.6 Ethics statement
Chapter 8: South Africa and Open Source
8.1 Introduction
8.2 The South African Government and FOSS
8.3 The SA Government’s Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS)
8.4 The Organisation
8.5 Discussion
8.6 Conclusion
Chapter 9: The Open Source (OS) Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Project
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The initial PS ECM System
9.3 Reasons for choosing the OS ECM project as a pilot project
9.4 The purpose of the OS ECM project
9.5 The parties involved in the OS ECM project
9.6 The phases of the OS ECM Project
9.7 Discussion
9.8 Conclusion
Chapter 10: A Change Management Perspective on the Case Study
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Change Management Strategy
10.3 Internal External Organisation
10.4 Technology
10.5 Discussion
10.6 Conclusion
Chapter 11: An Institutional Perspective on the Case Study
11.1 Introduction
11.2 IT/IS as an institutional process in and of itself
11.3 OSS and PS as different institutions
11.4 Using institutional theory to study a process of sociotechnical change
11.5 Conclusion
Chapter 12: Reflection on Research Questions and Contributions
12.1 Introduction
12.2 Revisiting the research problem
12.3 Contributions
12.4 Research limitations
12.5 Possible future research
References
