BUILDING A CLIENT-FOCUSED IT ORGANIZATION

Building a client-focused IT organization

Building a client-focused IT organization

Introduction

In July 1995, the University of Memphis created a new organizational unit, Information Systems (IS), and employed a new chief information officer (CIO) to lead it. The unit and the CIO position were constructed to play key roles in helping the institution move ahead aggressively in employing information technology (IT) more productively in both academic and administrative areas.

It was immediately evident that the new organization made up of units from different parts of the campus would need to establish a common organizational culture. Given the major projects that were to be implemented it was also evident that the new culture had to be one that looked to the future more than it remained seated in the past. The CIO set forth a goal of moving toward a “learning organization” (LO) over the next four to five years.

Experts such as Peter Senge, Ed Schein, and David Garvin define organizational learning as essentially an organization's ability to adapt to change. DiBella and Nevis (1998, p. 27) add to that definition the idea that organizational learning also involves how individuals within the organization process the experience of adaptation. They point out that there is an important relationship between learning and culture, and that LO consultants tend to approach their work based on one of three perspectives. The first is a normative LO approach which says that learning occurs when organizations have the right culture. The second is a developmental view which believes that as organizations evolve so too does their culture and from that their learning style. The third is the capability LO perspective which holds that organizations are cultures where knowledge about behaviors and values is continually being shared. How such knowledge is shared creates pathways that lead to continuous learning. A normative perspective leads managers to diagnose barriers to learning and attempt to lessen or eliminate them. The capabilities viewpoint assumes that learning is embedded in culture and attempts to identify the existing processes and to utilize them. In the developmental approach the focus is not on learning as much as on the organization's stage of development and the process of transition (DiBella and Nevis, 1998, p. 16).

Assuming that each perspective provides some element of reality, an integrated strategy for building learning capability was chosen to be employed at the University of Memphis. The paradigm selected for implementation was “The Eight-Stage Process of Creating Major Change” by John Kotter (Kotter, 1996, p. 21). The stages are:

establishing a sense of urgency;

creating the guiding coalition;

developing a vision and strategy;

communicating the change vision;

empowering broad-based action;

generating short-term wins;

consolidating gains and producing more change; and

anchoring new approaches in the culture.

Each stage is addressed in the following sections of this paper.

The need to change (establishing a sense of urgency)

The IS organization of July 1995 consisted of disparate units that had functioned as a divisional group for several months led by an outside consultant. Many had not engaged in any substantial professional development for some ...