Leading Change

Computerworld - Gail Holmberg has to deliver more than a working system when she deploys a new initiative. "It's not a success for the company if that's all that happens," says Holmberg, CIO at Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp. in Chicago. Workers have to actually use the new product to improve how they do their day-to-day jobs.
Sounds simple, but IT executives know that managing change is a challenge. Staffers are usually quite comfortable with the status quo and often initially see change as more disruptive than helpful.
"Even when change is very positive, it's a challenging thing for people to go from how they do things today to what they'll be doing tomorrow," says Mary C. Finlay, deputy CIO at Partners HealthCare System Inc. in Boston.
Such challenges shouldn't stop any organization from going ahead with changes, however. Change can be successfully managed, and the following steps can help you move your business and your people to where they need to be.

1. Have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. "IT leaders often have difficulty ensuring that their visions are clear, specific and framed from multiple perspectives so they can reach all the various people they need to reach," says Sheila J. Smith, a senior consultant at Ouellette & Associates Consulting Inc. in Bedford, N.H.
As a positive example, Smith points to one IT department that, when assessing how it could improve support for users, determined what the support process should look like in the future and how that differed from its current setup. Then the department articulated that evolution to everyone who would be affected by the change.

2. Build alliances. Seek out leaders within other departments to champion changes. "If we can get those [business] people on our side, we'll get everything to work," says Angelo Mazzocco, vice president and CIO at The Dispatch Printing Co. in Columbus, Ohio.

Image Credit: John Ueland