Winners successfully manage change (page 1 of 2)

If IT requirements for change were created during the course of a football game, the referee would be forced to toss a flag and call a penalty for unnecessary roughness or 'piling on.'

Since the computer's inception, every business decision has triggered a series of IT events. The ability to manage change increasingly differentiates the companies that win from the rest of the pack.

The axiom that ;the only constant is change; has been an inescapable business reality since the beginning of the computer age. Transformation faces us every day we need to be able to react to new business opportunities, respond to ever-changing government regulatory requirements as well as adapt and innovate our technology while delivering information faster, more efficiently, and to more places than ever before.

Yet no single change occurs in isolation. For example, if you're a health care company about to embrace new mobile computing technologies, you'll probably also be required to tackle new issues regarding security, application integration and printing while ensuring Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, (HIPAA), compliance.

Or, if you're a publicly traded company rolling out a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, you'll need to incorporate additional steps related to business continuity, and information storage and retrieval to meet the mandates of Sarbanes-Oxley. And you'll need to consider the overriding business processes that sit on top of the technology and how they wind their way through the enterprise.

Well-managed change improves the health of your corporation. It's change 'that would do you good.' The key in today's rapidly evolving environment is to thrive on change. To embrace it and to ensure IT remains an increasingly competitive asset of your corporation.

Today's enterprises require an IT that is highly adaptable to new business initiatives while using technology to deliver predictable, innovative solutions at a lower total cost of ownership and with reduced risk. It requires change that embraces industry-standard architectures, modular components and consistent implementations.

For some, the very notion of change becomes ominous, replete with threats of impending havoc. The reason is simple: lack of standardization induces fear because of requirements for a great deal of manual intervention, the creation of custom application interfaces and the possible updating of vendor software all tasks with a high track record of error.

Nothing really changes

While much has changed throughout the years, many issues remain the same and errors that result from lack of standardization are substantially magnified when applications run on an infrastructure that is monolithic and silo-like. For many companies, fear of change or fear of the consequences of change has resulted in over-provisioning of infrastructure for 'just-in-case' purposes along with a subsequent increase in staff to manage the complex, unwieldy environment.

Further, the increasingly complex environment also increased the time gaps between business decision and IT deployment. Today's CIOs can no longer live in a world where business decisions reached within four weeks take three to six months or more to implement.

Chances are requirements for change will continue at a relentless and probably even faster pace. In addition to pursuing corporate business opportunities, several global factors today greatly influence the need to adapt.