Ontological Solution for IT-Organisational Change Problems: A Change and Constancy Management Approach

Abstract

In modern dynamic business environments, organisations typically experience organisational and Information Technology (IT) changes. However, the reported success rates of organisational and IT changes are low, less than half. This paper proposed a management approach to address change and constancy together for improving the management and potentially the success rates of IT-organisational changes. The research problem was the scarcity of research about managing change and constancy together and the study responded to calls for further research on IT and change management perspectives. The paper was empirical, exploratory and qualitative. A grounded theory methodology was followed to collect and analyse interview data. The paper has value for academics in its theory development from an ontological basis. The interviewees did not elaborate on any failed IT-organisational change initiatives, possibly because such information was highly sensitive, and only alluded to experiencing unintended negative consequences of changes. The empirical evidence did demonstrate that both change and constancy exist in these IT-organisational environments, which corresponded with the ontological position of the paper, that change and constancy exist in cohesion. This answered the first research question and supported the central argument of the paper. However, the answer to the second research question was that the change and constancy ontology could be beneficial, but in what specific form is not clear, since the interviewees indicated potential benefits but also stated the impracticalities of its current proposal. Specifically, the interviewees considered constancy a default state requiring negligible active management in comparison to managing change. Thus, the idea of managing change and constancy together did not result in much interest when prompted by the researcher. Such a result could be due to the proposed approach being impractical or new and not yet contemplated or perhaps it is more appropriate as a theoretical lens for analysing. Further data collection is planned to investigate this. The paper involved two different organisations and five participants, which may limit the transferability of the findings, but, sufficient value is evident in the paper for interest, debate and evaluation among academics and application among practitioners.