title: A New Model for Strategic IT-Enabling Change Programmes
Creators: name: Macdougall, C
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2017

description: Organisations use Information Technology (IT) as an enabler to disrupt and make change within an organisation. The successful delivery of Strategic IT-Enabling Change Programmes requires a more strategic and integrated approach to combat the persistent and global IT project/programme failure rate that is consuming millions of dollars unnecessarily. As such, their successful delivery requires an approach that integrates aspects from the fields of IT, Change and Programme Management. IT-Enabling Change Programmes are people centric, complex, multidimensional and multifaceted. These projects/programs may bring about cultural change in an organization or transformation of business practices. Driving this change can bring about uncertainty and ambiguity, and leadership is key to successful delivery. The organisational environment for delivery of IT-Enabling Change is complex, dynamic and evolving. As such the project/program requires constant alignment between the business, the industry, the technology, and operations and cater for emergence. As a result, IT-Enabling Change often brings with it adaptive challenges, challenges that the organization may not have anticipated. These change programmes require agility and the ability to be adaptive to the dynamic changing environments they are delivering for and into. Further, delivery of IT-Enabling change into the organization needs to be carefully transitioned into the organization for its successful adoption. IT-Enabling Change Programmes therefore needs the different types of leadership from complexity leadership; ‘adaptive leadership’ to lead the projects and respond to the challenges presented and ‘enabling leadership’ to support, champion, protect and transition the project/program. To build their success, this leadership requires an increased focus on people related factors in addition to the task related factors of time, cost and quality and an approach to build these factors. This Action Research presents a conceptual and holistic model that combines the critical people related factors of Change Programme Leadership, Executive Sponsorship, Stakeholder Partnership and Team Resiliency with the task related factors of Time, Cost and Quality for Strategic IT-Enabling Change Programmes. The Action Research evaluates and confirms these people related factors as critical to the success of IT-Enabling Change Programmes in Australian State Government Departments. The critical success factors and the supporting models to build these factors, have been informed by research and professional experience. The criticality of these factors and the ability to build them requires change programme leadership and a greater focus by organisations to arrest their own IT project/programme failure rate. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of a Strategic IT-Enabling Change Programmes the research has drawn on perspectives from multiple theories but has been grounded in complexity theory. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge in IT-Enabling Change and has implications to practitioners and the methodologies in this field.