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Chapter 10
Change management
Learning objectives
• Identify the different types of change that need
to be managed for e-commerce;
• Develop an outline plan for implementing e-
commerce change;
• Describe alternative approaches to
organisation structure resulting from
organisational change.
Issues for managers
• Should we change organizational structure in
response to e-business? If so, what are the
options?
• How do we manage the human aspects of the
implementation of organizational change?
• How do we share knowledge between staff in
the light of high staff-turnover and rapid
changes in market conditions?
Key change management issues
• Schedule – what are the suitable stages for introducing change?
• Budget – how do we cost e-business?
• Resources needed – what type of resources do we need, what are their responsibilities and where do we obtain them?
• Organizational structures – do we need to revise organizational structure?
• Managing the human impact of change – what is the best way to introduce large-scale e-business change to employees?
• Technologies to support e-business change – the role of knowledge management, groupware and intranets are explored.
• Risk management approaches to e-business led change.
Key factors in achieving
change
Figure 10.1 Key factors in achieving change
Scale of change
• Hammer and Champy (1993) defined BPR as the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
• Fundamental rethinking – re-engineering usually refers to changing of significant business processes such as customer service, sales order processing or manufacturing.
• Radical redesign – re-engineering is not involved with minor, incremental change or automation of existing ways of working. It involves a complete rethinking about the way business processes operate.
• Dramatic improvements – the aim of BPR is to achieve improvements measured in tens or hundreds of percent. With automation of existing processes only single figure improvements may be possible.
• Critical contemporary measures of performance – this point refers to the importance of measuring how well the processes operate in terms of the four important measures of cost, quality, service and speed.
Different scales of change
Term Involves Intention Risk of failure
Business
process re-
engineering
Fundamental redesign
of all main company
processes
Large gains in
performance
(>100%?)
Highest
Business
process
improvement
Targets key processes
in sequence for
redesign
(<50%) Medium
Business
process
automation
Automating existing
process
(<20%) Lowest
Project management activities
• Estimation – identifying the activities involved in the project, sometimes referred to as a work breakdown structure (WBS).
• Resource allocation – after the initial WBS, appropriate resources can be allocated to the tasks.
• Schedule/plan – after resource allocation, the amount of time for each task can be determined according to the availability and skills of the people assigned to the tasks.
• Monitoring and control – monitoring involves ensuring the project is working to plan once it has started. Control is taking corrective action if the project deviates from the plan. In particular the project manager will want to hit milestones
Stages in developing an
e-business solution
Figure 10.2 Stages in developing an e-business solution
An example web site development
schedule for the B2C Company
Figure 10.3 An example web site development schedule for The B2C Company
Automating the employee
development process
Figure 10.4 Automating the employee development process
Source: Confirmit Copyright © 2003 FIRM
Organisational structures for
e-business and e-commerce
Organizational structure Circumstances Advantages Disadvantages
(a) No formal structure
for e-commerce
Initial response to e-commerce
or poor leadership with no
identification of need for
change.
Can achieve rapid response to
e-commerce service
responses (e-mail, phone).
Priorities not decided logically.
Insufficient resources
Poor quality site in terms of
content quality and
customer
(b) A separate
committee or
department manages
and coordinates e-
commerce
Identification of problem and
response in (a)
Coordination and budgeting
and resource allocation
possible.
May be difficult to get
different departments to
deliver their input due to
other commitments
(c) A separate business
unit with independent
budgets
Internet contribution (Chapter
6) is sizeable (>20%)
As for (b), but can set own
targets and not be constrained
by resources. Lower risk
option than (d)
Has to respond to
corporate strategy. Conflict
of interests between
department and traditional
business
(d) A separate operating
company
Major revenue potential or
flotation. Need to differentiate
from parent
As for (c), but can set strategy
independently. Can maximize
market potential
High risk if market potential
is overestimated due to
start-up costs
Summary of alternative organizational structures
for e-commerce suggested in Parsons et al.
Figure 10.5 Summary of alternative organizational structures for e-commerce
suggested in Parsons et al. (1996)
Hallowell on scalability 1
„described as “virtual‟‟ (either pure information or automated) and “physical‟‟ (requiring some degree of human intervention).
… because the nature and quantity of physical service necessary to deliver value to customers influences the quantity of human intervention required, it also influences a firm‟s ratio of variable to fixed costs, which alters its “scalability‟‟.
The paradox comes in that while reduced scalability is viewed negatively by many venture capitalists and proponents of ecommerce, the cause of that reduction in scalability, human intervention, may help a firm to differentiate its offering to customers, thus providing a source of competitive advantage.’
Hallowell on scalability 2
‘For firms that are very high on the scalability continuum, the need for physical
service does not present a “scalability” problem.
At these firms, information is the core service offering. Physical service is
relatively insignificant, both from customers‟ perspectives (use of physical
service is infrequent,if at all) and from the firm‟s perspective (it represents a
very small portion of total costs).
Thus, these firms do not rely on physical service (and the employees it
requires) to differentiate their offering; their differentiation tends to come from
the quality of their content and the ease with which users can access it.
In contrast, firms that sell non-information services such as travel, or goods
such as books, toys, or antiques require significantly more complex physical
service operations. The degree to which they need more physical service is
inversely proportional to the degree to which they are “scalable”.‟
Outsourcing example
Amazon:
‘manages customer relationships through its website while relying on publishers for product development, Visa and Mastercard for revenue collection and UPS, the parcel service, for logistics. It also outsources much of its call-centre management to specialist suppliers’.
Outsourcing benefits – activity
•
•
•
•
•
BUT…
• ‘The snag, as many failed internet ventures
discovered, is that it is hard to co-ordinate the
activities of business partners without a large
supporting bureaucracy. Poor customer
service and higher-than-anticipated costs
often resulted. Amazon is one of the few
companies of its generation that made the
idea work.’
Outsourcing risks - activity
•
•
•
•
•
Outsourcing - Hagel’s view
Companies try to excel at three different types of activity:
managing customer relationships,
routine processing of information and development of new products.
He believes that companies will in future tend to concentrate on just one, while buying in the others as required.
Examples?
Oticon
Transition curve indicating the
reaction of staff through time from
when change is first suggested
Figure 10.7 Transition curve indicating the reaction of staff through time from
when change is first suggested
Source: Bocij et al. (2003)
Key staff in systems acceptance
• System sponsors –
• System owners –
• System users –
• Stakeholders –
• Legitimizer –
• Opinion leaders –
The role of organisational culture
• Survival (outward-looking, flexible) – the external environment plays a significant role (an open system) in governing company strategy. The company will likely be driven by customer demands and will be an innovator. It may have a relatively flat structure.
• Productivity (outward-looking, ordered) – interfaces with the external environment are well structured and the company is typically sales-driven and is likely to have a hierarchical structure.
• Human relations (inward-looking, flexible) – this is the organization as family, with interpersonal relations more important than reporting channels, a flatter structure and staff development and empowerment is thought of as important by managers.
• Stability (inward-looking, ordered) – the environment is essentially ignored with managers concentrating on internal efficiency and again managed through a hierarchical structure.
Knowledge Management – Saunders (2000)
„Every day, knowledge essential to your
business walks out of your door, and much of
it never comes back. Employees leave,
customers come and go and their knowledge
leaves with them. This information drain costs
you time, money and customers.‟
IDC – objectives of KM
• Improving profit/growing revenue (67 per cent)
• Retaining key talent/expertise (54 per cent)
• Increasing customer retention and/or satisfaction (52 per cent)
• Defending market share against new entrants (44 per cent)
• Gaining faster time to market with products (39 per cent)
• Penetrating new market segments (39 per cent)
• Reducing costs (38 per cent)
• Developing new products/services (35 per cent)
Differences between knowledge management, data
processing and information management
• Consider a retail manager analysing their sales figures.
• Raw data on sales figures consist of figures in each individual store for a given month. IS can present this data within the context of sales compared to previous months as information.
• This information is of little value if the manager does not know how to act in response to it. Managers apply their knowledge to decide how to respond if the sales in one region are much lower than others, or if one store is underperforming against budget.
• Thus knowledge is the processing of information and is a skill based on previous understanding, procedures and experience.
Explicit and tacit knowledge
• Knowledge Management - Techniques and tools for capturing and disseminating knowledge within an organization.
• Explicit – details of processes and procedures. Explicit knowledge can be readily detailed in procedural manuals and databases. Examples include records of meetings between sales representatives and key customers, procedures for dealing with customer service queries and management reporting processes.
• Tacit – less tangible than explicit knowledge, this is experience on how to react to a situation when many different variables are involved. It is more difficult to encapsulate this knowledge, which often resides in the heads of employees.
Binney – classes of KM applications
1. Transactional. Help desk and customer service applications.
2. Analytical. Data warehousing and data mining for CRM applications.
3. Asset management. Document and content management.
4. Process support. TQM, benchmarketing, BPR, Six Sigma.
5. Developmental. Enhancing staff skills, competencies – training and e-learning.
6. Innovation and creation. Communities, collaboration and virtual teamwork.
2 perspectives on KM
• It is impossible to achieve full benefits from knowledge management unless individuals are willing and motivated to share their knowledge or unless organizations lose their structural rigidity to permit information and knowledge flow - IDC 2000
• Knowledge can only be volunteered – it cannot be conscripted Snowden 2002
Chevron example – connections in $2 billion saving
1. Connection to the explicit knowledge via an intranet with a portal with search tools and a directory of information.
2. Connection of people to people with specialized knowledge through an expertise locator; a type of phone directory with people in different expertise categories, again also accessed via search tools.
3. Connection to communities of practice which can help sharing and learning between people.
4. Connection of knowledge and people with processes, products and services.
Risk Management
1. Identify risks including their probabilities and
impacts.
2. Identify possible solutions to these risks.
3. Implement the solutions, targeting the
highest impact, most likely risks.
4. Monitor the risks to learn for future risk
assessment.
Activity – identify risks for e-business project
Risk Probability Impact Solution
Insufficient senior management
commitment
5 7 Education/training/lobbying by e-business manager to
achieve buy-in
High staff turnover/key staff
leave
6 5 Use monetary incentives and improve working
environment
Project milestones not met,
overrun budget
8 6 Appoint experienced project manager and provide
support and resources needed. Manager will perform
risk management such as this
Problems with new technology
delaying implementation (bugs,
speed, compatibility)
8 8 Allow sufficient time for volume, performance testing
Staff resistance to change 4 4 Education, training identification of change facilitators
amongst staff
Problem with integrating with
partner’s systems (e.g.
customers or suppliers)
6 8 Tackle these issues early on, identify one contact
point/manager for each of partnerships
New system fails after
changeover (too slow or too
many crashes)
9 See solution to delayed implementation
Barriers to KM – IDC survey
• Lack of understanding of KM and its benefits (55 per cent)
• Lack of employee time for KM (45 per cent)
• Lack of skill in KM techniques (40 per cent)
• Lack of encouragement in the current culture for sharing (35 per cent)
• Lack of incentives/rewards to share (30 per cent)
• Lack of funding for KM initiatives (24 per cent)
• Lack of appropriate technology (18 per cent)
• Lack of commitment from senior management (15 per cent)
