Organizations Need Help To Work Through Business Transformations
The pressures of digital disruptions, changing regulations, customer expectations, and shifting markets affect every business. A top concern in C-suites is the ability of their organizations to change individual and group behaviors when the company must respond quickly to a business-driven change in operations.
A concern at the operational level is the need to replace the legacy applications that support current business operations with new ones supporting new goals. IT applications are central to a business transformation, which deals with three elements:
- The structure of operational workflows, processes, and organizations;
- The IT applications that support workflows, processes, and organizations; and
- The people and organizations that do the work and use the applications.
Change management efforts often focus on the natural human resistance to change, which is a reality that affects every organization. Just as important are the applications that support the daily work because they affect the time and resources demanded of people tasked with completing a transformation. Unfortunately, the labor, time, and expense required to change legacy IT applications limits the changes organizations are able to make to operational work.
An essential component for business transformation is simplifying and automating IT. The ability to develop and deploy new applications that support revised business operations, quickly and easily, is essential for business agility.
Instant IT® automation supports business transformation efforts and is the foundation for transforming IT. A transformed IT will need to master its own operational change, which can make IT a center for change management efforts that combine:
- Transforming work processes, with Instant IT® Business Design,
- Generating new applications, with Instant IT® computer-generated custom applications, and
- Becoming proficient with helping people at all levels adapt to reshaped work processes.
Change Management Helps Companies Transform Themselves
It is essential that transformation efforts are not done to people but with people working to achieve company goals. Change management practices support business units needing help with reinventing themselves.
Operational Design
Once the overall goals for a transformative change are identified, leaders and SMEs from the affected business operations must help redesign the organization, processes, user interface, how work will be done, and how success will be measured. This design will describe the characteristics of the transformed business operation, not IT systems, hardware, or software.
Management and Control
Tackling resistance to change starts with offering a level of management and control to those who will be affected by change. Involving operational leaders and SMEs is the first step, and it is important to ensure they are participants throughout the initiative. They must also have roles in goal-setting and collaborate on decisions at each step.
Increased Automation
It is the nature of digital transformations that they will automate work currently done by people. Automation, when done with a focus on developing an application, can lose sight of knowledge people apply to different use cases the automated action will support. It is critical to identify all business data and rules people use so the data elements and rules can be automated.
With InfoNovus Instant IT, operational change is driven by the goals of the business and how it needs to operate going forward.
Successful transformation efforts share these change management principles:
- Commitment by top executives to stand behind the transformation effort and see it through.
- Process reinvention, because transformative change requires rethinking work processes and breaking through operational silos.
- Technology, which goes beyond business applications currently in use and looks for opportunities to increase automation of process work and actions.
- Organizational cooperation, which InfoNovus believes is the most important principle for overall success.
It is critical to involve people who understand how best to transform operational work and will work together to meet new business goals and performance levels.
Why Change Management Is So Important
Change management is often avoided or discounted as too imprecise and touchy-feely. Yes, it requires a focus on human nature, culture, and personal interactions, but transformations cannot happen without affecting each of these.
When combined with InfoNovus Instant IT® Business Design of operational processes and workflows, change management can be more focused and, at the same time, more accommodating to the way people want to do their transformed work. This is not change management for deeper organizational development issues but it does help a company adapt quickly when it needs to.
Business Agility
Companies will have to become more agile to meet rapidly changing customer expectations and survive in a dynamic marketplace. The ability to evolve with new conditions requires change management capabilities to facilitate changes to business goals and work activities.
Digital Business
Technologies that increase automation continue to be developed. Many come to market each year. With more and more people reacting strongly to the way technology affects their jobs and daily lives, it is a certainty that change management will become an essential capability.
Change Management Needs To Be Part Of Every Transformation Effort
The depth and extent of business challenges to transform services and operations underscore the need for change management capabilities to help businesses move quickly into the future.