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Systems Thinking > Management of Change
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Change and Management Philosophy: |
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For many years organizations in many countries around the world adopted many of the new improvement philosophies to lower their organizations' operating cost without compromising the quality of their services or their products. New management philosophies as Total Quality Management (TOM), Business Process Engineering (BPR), Restructuring and Downsizing (RD), and Continuous Improvement (CI), in addition to various implementation of Information Technologies (IT) can be found to be applied now in many organizations with different levels of success. These improvement philosophies are applied in all fields of service and production from health care to education and from production to utility and power generation. In industry, in addition to these improvement initiatives, industrial organizations may adopt other initiatives as Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Production Planning and Concurrent Engineering.
Implementations of these philosophies differ in approaches and context but most of these implementations are carried out in stepwise and are based on process oriented structure. It is expected that the end products of these process-based efforts will never become automatically integerable with the rest of the corporate. For these reason Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as one of IT applications, comes to the picture to smooth out the outcome of these efforts and its deliverables.
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Business Process Reengineering (PBR): |
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BPR is defined as "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary, measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed", (Hammer, 1993). Number of researches have looked at BPR as a method of planning and controlling the change and considered it as one of the strategic change management, (Furey and Diori, 1994). Despite what was promoted about this change strategy number of researchers have attributed its weak record of success to its structure and character (Attran, 2003, Chan, et. Al.,1999). According to Nwabueze (2000), examination of the underlying property of BPR indicated that it is anti-systemic in character. He concluded that BPR lacked a clear strategy for its implementation as it also fails to address the numerous elements that affect the work environment. For this reason new approaches were introduced to guide the implementation.
To deal with the shortcomings of BPR Champy (2002) introduced X-Engineering as a new reengineering initiative for corporate reengineering. X-Engineering is meant to reengineer the process across the corporate boundaries, and use the concepts of e-commerce and the internet technologies.
A comparison between BPR basic principles with systems concept and systems thinking shows that addressing the processes separately will not bring the required improvement and may bring difficulties in other parts of the system. |
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IT implementation and change: |
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It is surprising how long it should take, after these large number of failed IT projects, before our managers can look back and realize the fundamental reason of launching the PBR initiative in the 1990s. The purpose was not to automate the existing process. Hammer (1990) message was " Do not automate, obliterate". Grover (2003) indicated that "if you automate a mess, all what you get is an automated mess". For this reason it was realized that system change should not be driven by IT implementation, and information systems development researchers spent the last thirty years (started by De Marco in 1968) to develop new development methodologies. Process redesign was part of many of these methodologies before PBR was launched. Now with the present shift to the Internet technology with its associated business in all fields, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has emerged as one of the tools for corporate redesign and alignment. It is understood now that because IT implementations go in separate way, and not considered to be part of organizational alignment efforts, most of its power was lost.
It should be note here that IT implementation should not be looked at as just a computerization project, it should be built on a solid foundation of the organization whatever its type or its field of application. |
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Total Quality Management (TQM): |
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TQM is a process oriented improvement philosophy. Beginning in 19980s and through the 1990s, quality became a major issue for managers in USA and many parts of the world. Recently, there has been increasing interest in applying TQM philosophy in education and health care industry.. Although quality improvement becomes one of the organizational initiatives, until now there are conflicting views about total quality implementations (Denanona and Born 2000). There are mainly three frameworks for total quality (TQ). These are:
- Crosby (1979) who focuses on reducing cost through quality improvement
- Deming (1989) framework emphasizes the system nature of organization, and the
- importance of leadership and the need to reduce the variation in organizational
process, and
- Jurans (1989) framework involves three sets of activities: quality planning, control,
improvement emphasizing the use of statistical tools.
Other implementation of TQ brings more variations to its meaning and objectives. Dean and Bowen (2000) see TQ as a philosophy or as an approach to management that can be characterized by its principles, practice, and techniques. Its three principles are customer focus, continuous improvement, and teamwork.
The author of this site has number of reservations regarding the implementation of TQ in our society regarding these three principles (the customer, the process, and the team).
The author finds the definition of Easton and Jarrell, (1998) for TQM as one of the management systems to be the most convincing and practical definition. |
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| It is most wisely to define TQM as one of the corporate management systems, to be integrated with all other processing functions of the organization, and to be used to complement the culture of system improvement |
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Just In Time Manufacturing (JIT) |
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JIT is a philosophy of manufacturing based on planned elimination of
all waste and continuous improvement (CI) of productivity. It has
different implementation known as lean
production, stockless
production, and common sense production.
JIT was developed by Toyota in 1950 and known as Toyota production
system, and used now by many Japanese firms. Now JIT is
efficiently realized now by the introduction of E-business and internet
technology. By building a chain of timely supply and production
and maintaining minimum inventory at all times. To read more about
JIT visit:
http://www.strategosinc.com/just_in_time.htm
http://www.clubpom.com/Student_Wing/Public/JITtutorial.html |
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Proactive Maintenance (ProM): |
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Continuous improvement (CI) as a philosophy for change encompassing organization-wide process by systematic improvement of process, product and service, is one of the tenets of the quality management ideology (Savolainen, 1999). CI normally introduced in cycles and can be implemented to go deep into the cultural levels of the organization and becomes parts of the renewal process, or just to touch the processing functions and becomes part of downsizing and structuring or just a change. Renewal encompasses managerial ideological thinking and organizational practice, and linked to the organizational adoptive behavior. Renewal requires a management transformation that bringing learning capacity to the organization. |
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Continuous Improvement (CI): |
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Continuous improvement (CI) as a philosophy for change encompassing organization-wide process by systematic improvement of process, product and service, is one of the tenets of the quality management ideology (Savolainen, 1999). CI normally introduced in cycles and can be implemented to go deep into the cultural levels of the organization and becomes parts of the renewal process, or just to touch the processing functions and becomes part of downsizing and structuring or just a change. Renewal encompasses managerial ideological thinking and organizational practice, and linked to the organizational adoptive behavior. Renewal requires a management transformation that bringing learning capacity to the organization. |
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Social
Interaction in Systems Development:
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Success of the project is measured by satisfying the user requirements and achieving the objective of development. This success depends on both the analyst team and the users team and the pattern of interaction between both of them.
In many cases this pattern of interaction becomes very complex and result in disatifying users and frustrated analyst. There are two reasons for this result:
1. Both sides (the analyst and the user) do not share the same orientation to the problem
2. Most of the methodologies used for the development neglect the human dimension (user's concern) during the developing phases.
SSM is the only methodology developed with human activity system (HAS) in its core, but was not designed to handle IS development, ETICHS addresses the participation of the user during the development phases, and all other methodologies are highly technically oriented and consider the user only during the design of the system interface, as screens and scenarios at the end of the design phase.
With SSM (Wilson 1990, p28) shows that HAS to be composed of two subsystems as shown in the figure: |
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(Wilson 1990, p28b) |
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This illustration explains why we need to put more balance on the activity system which operates based on the logical relations between activities, rather than the present emphasis of our social drive.
Simply our objective for change to become "More logic with less harmful sociality".
Only through a balanced behavior a well disciplined HAS can be achieved with more project success.
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Technical Issues: |
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Most of IS development efforts in Egypt and the Arab world are driven by technical factors by concentrating on programming and hardware devices. For this reason it is not surprising to notice an increasing rate of failure for most of our IS projects. Business process reengineering or system reengineering does not represent a priority for any IS project. In a study conducted by the American University in Cairo () it was found that most of the private companies did not adopt BPR in any of their projects.
This site invites people, companies, and organizations to send their experience with their development projects in Egypt and Arab world so we can assess the reason for systems failure.
Please send your experience to info@analysthome.com
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Socio-Technical Dimension: |
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Information Systems (IS) is highly dependent on both social and technical interaction between system elements and humans. Neither can be isolated from the other. For this reason development process is highly affected also by these two factors, and concentrating on technical issues only during the development process will not bring the desired change, no matter how genius the system is.
Some people believe that just spreading more automations and computers will force people to change! Do we know the direction of change? Should we measure and assess the change at some points?
The author believe that the maximum benefit from IS can only be achieved when human and social dimensions are taken into consideration during the project development. SDLC should be viewed through two accompanying change and accumulation cycles namely:
1. Knowledge accumulation cycle
2. Culture change cycle
These in addition to the systems development cycles which can be represented in multilayer. At the core is the program and products, the second is the business area, the third is the information, up to the last layer which is the business environment layer within the society layer. The society culture produces a field which cuts through each of the development layers and separate the two accumulation and change cycles. This is as if the society field diffuses between the knowledge accumulation and culture change cycles. Sustainable change can be only achieved if the development cycle at each level crosses this cut and joins the culture gap. The cut effect has its minimum at the core or the program layer, and increases as we go out to the society. |
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Real Life Problems: |
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In this part we would like to publish real life problems related to systems development. We are interested in problems which touch our daily life to show how it can be analyzed modeled and solved. Many problems worth to studied. We are inviting concerned persons to take part in this experiment and share their experience.
Please send your proposal to info@analysthome.com |
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