Change Management is a critical activity for any company; Implementation of new technologies or modified processes imply important impacts to the business. For that reason, often Change Management departments report (directly or indirectly) to IT.
One problem is that this activity is often overseen and that should be a subject of a whole different discussion.
What I would like to focus on is that IT departments have been filling the role of Change Enablers, where change is most often requested from the business side of things and IT only "enables" change, being the long time saying "gate keepers" of new technologies. Examples of these would be for example the adoption of changes in Sales Order process. It most often comes as a Business request, justified supported and implemented by IT.
The problem is that in the last 5-10 years SAP Business suite reached a level of maturity that makes new business functionality been delivered less often. In another hand, Technology changes in SAP Netweaver have been ENORMOUS. We have had the introduction of the following:
- Portals (I know, it has been there for longer than that...);
- Object Oriented programming (since 4.6...);
- BPM (new)
- Java;
- Webdynpro;
- PI;
- BI (BW + BO);
- etc. etc.
My point is around that. While most companies have been able to harvest the best in terms of SAP functionalities (modules), the adoption of new technologies have been very limited. And that SHOULD be the role of IT. IT as change promoters within the organizations.
Often organizations have IT policies that are too strict and outdated and that could limit early adoption of new technologies. How many companies have adopted wireless networks within the office, for example? How many SOA initiatives could see resistence because (exposes) the ERP to the external world? Afraid of Internet????
If IT is not the promoter of these new technologies, like adoption of Object Oriented programming, Web Dynpro or PI, who will then be? Would we expect the Business to request that?? no way...
Internet is good and is here to stay;
Open standards and Open Source are no evil;
Internet Explorer is not necessarily the best neither the safest Internet Browser (Sarcastic here);
Instant message is a reallity even in corporate world;
Object Oriented programming is inevitable;
It is time to call the Change Management team to perform a good overhaul on the IT strategies and revise old paradigms. In other words... We need good IT architects.
CHANGE IS GOOD
