Ass.5 in MIS2

In the spectrum of organizational change, which is the most radical type of change: automation, rationalization of procedures, business reengineering, or paradigm shifts?


Definition of Organizational Change

Companies that are undergoing or that have undergone a transformation. This keyword should always be used in conjunction with "Success Story" or "Experiment" or "Failed Experiment." (Process)

Organizational Change

Significant organizational change occurs, for example, when an organization changes its overall strategy for success, adds or removes a major section or practice, and/or wants to change the very nature by which it operates. It also occurs when an organization evolves through various life cycles, just like people must successfully evolve through life cycles. For organizations to develop, they often must undergo significant change at various points in their development. That's why the topic of organizational change and development has become widespread in communications about business, organizations, leadership and management.

Leaders and managers continually make efforts to accomplish successful and significant change -- it's inherent in their jobs. Some are very good at this effort (probably more than we realize), while others continually struggle and fail. That's often the difference between people who thrive in their roles and those that get shuttled around from job to job, ultimately settling into a role where they're frustrated and ineffective. There are many schools with educational programs about organizations, business, leadership and management. Unfortunately, there still are not enough schools with programs about how to analyze organizations, identify critically important priorities to address (such as systemic problems or exciting visions for change) and then undertake successful and significant change to address those priorities. This Library topic aims to improve that situation.

Organizational Change Theory
Article By: eHow Contributing Writer

An organization may have no other choice but to change. There are many reasons for an organization to change, such as a sudden change of the economic climate or the arising threat of competition. Through understanding the process and theory of organizational change, you and your organization can handle change in the best possible way.

In Gareth R. Jones and Jennifer M. George's book, Contemporary Management, organizational change is defined as "the movement of an organization away from its present state and toward some desired future state to increase its efficiency and effectiveness." During organizational change, managers must balance the need to improve current operations with the need to respond to new and unpredictable events.

Lewin's Force-Field Theory of Change

Kurt Lewin developed a theory about organizational change called the force-field theory. George and Jones describe the force-field theory as follows: a "wide variety of forces arise from the way an organization operates, from its structure, culture and control systems that make it resistant to change. At the same time, a wide variety of forces arise from changing task and general environments that push organizations toward change. These two sets of forces are always in opposition in an organization." For an organization to change, managers must find ways to increase the forces for change, decrease the resistance of change, or do both at the same time.

•Evolutionary Change
Evolutionary change is described by George and Jones as "gradual, incremental, and narrowly focused." It is not drastic or sudden, but a constant attempt to improve. An example of evolutionary change is total quality management that is consistently applied and shows improvement over the long term.

•Revolutionary Change
Some organizations need change--fast. When faced with drastic and unexpected change, an organization may have no other choice but to implement revolutionary change. George and Jones describe this as "change that is rapid, dramatic, and broadly focused. This bold shift may be due to a change in the economic climate or a new technological advancement that is integral to the function of the organization."

•Managing Change
Four steps exist in organizational change. First, assess the need for change through recognizing that a problem exists and identifying the problem's source. Secondly, decide on the change needed to be made by deciding what is the organization's ideal future state, as well as the obstacles that may occur during change. Thirdly, apply the change and decide whether change will occur from the top down or bottom up, then introduce and manage change. Lastly, evaluate the change by comparing the situation before and after the change or using benchmarking.

Explaining change and how it occurs has been a central theme in management and related disciplines. In a recent literature search using change and development as key words, researchers found more than a million articles on the subject in the disciplines of psychology, sociology, education, business, economics, as well as biology, medicine, meteorology, and geography (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). We know from this research that concepts, metaphors, and theories used to investigate change have yielded a rich, diverse theoretical landscape. Yet, at the same time, such diversity often has confounded rather than enlightened. It is difficult to compare and contrast theories and their results, let alone work out the relationships among them, when different units, levels of analysis, time frames, and perspectives are employed. Ideally, it would be useful to have a basic road map to guide us through the conceptual maze. While no map could possibly cover the entire terrain, one that puts the major elements of change into relief would be of advantage. That is the intention of this article. The goal is to provide an overview of change—its definition, scope, pace, and processes, with particular attention paid to radical change given the focus of this Special Issue. We seek to answer such questions as: “What is change? What are the types of change? How does change occur?” in order to inform the efforts to dramatically transform acquisition policy and process. While acquisition reform is not in the foreground of this analysis, it certainly provides the impetus and rationale for this endeavor. We begin with a conceptual framework that provides the backdrop for our understanding of radical change. We introduce four types of change that are differentiated by two dimensions—the pace and the scope of change. Building on these two dimensions, radical change is defined as the swift, dramatic transformation of an entire system. In the next section, we explore alternative explanations of how radical change occurs. Here the attention shifts to how change happens rather than what actually is changed. Four radical change processes are examined: radical change by chance, radical change by consensus, radical change by learning, and radical change by entrepreneurial design. We explore radical change by entrepreneurial design in the next section, since the overall focus in the symposium is how individuals can influence the radical change process. The intent is to outline various strategies and tactics that well-known public entrepreneurs have employed to affect radical change. The article concludes by identifying the conceptual framework’s most important implications for acquisition reform, such as whether radical change in acquisition can be pursued and who would be the likely public entrepreneurs leading the charge.

The most radical type of Organizational Change is the Automation.

Automation is the use of control systems (such as numerical control, programmable logic control, and other industrial control systems), in concert with other applications of information technology (such as computer-aided technologies [CAD, CAM, CAx]), to control industrial machinery and processes, reducing the need for human intervention.[1] In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization. Whereas mechanization provided human operators with machinery to assist them with the muscular requirements of work, automation greatly reduces the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well. Processes and systems can also be automated.

These are the other types of Organizational Change:

A Business Definition for Rationalization

The application of efficiency or effectiveness measures to an organization. Rationalization can occur at the onset of a downturn in an organization's performance or results. It usually takes the form of cutbacks intended to bring the organization back to profitability and may involve layoffs, plant closures, and cutbacks in supplies and resources. It often involves changes in organization structure, particularly in the form of downsizing. The term is also used in a cynical way as a euphemism for mass layoffs.

Business process reengineering (BPR)

Business process reengineering (BPR) is, in computer science and management, an approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business process that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business.

Paradigm shift

Paradigm shift (or revolutionary science) is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.

The term paradigm shift, as a change in a fundamental model of events, has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well, even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1977). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th-century theory of poetics, for instance. Since the 1960s, the term has been found useful to thinkers in numerous non-scientific contexts. Compare as a structured form of Zeitgeist.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and fathered, defined and popularized the concept of "paradigm shift" (p.10). Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions", and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another".

Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change. For example, agriculture changed early primitive society. The primitive Indians existed for centuries roaming the earth constantly hunting and gathering for seasonal foods and water. However, by 2000 B.C., Middle America was a landscape of very small villages, each surrounded by patchy fields of corn and other vegetables.

Agents of change helped create a paradigm-shift moving scientific theory from the Plolemaic system (the earth at the center of the universe) to the Copernican system (the sun at the center of the universe), and moving from Newtonian physics to Relativity and Quantum Physics. Both movements eventually changed the world view. These transformations were gradual as old beliefs were replaced by the new paradigms creating "a new gestalt" (p. 112).

Likewise, the printing press, the making of books and the use of vernacular language inevitable changed the culture of a people and had a direct affect on the scientific revolution. Johann Gutenberg's invention in the 1440's of movable type was an agent of change. Books became readily available, smaller and easier to handle and cheap to purchase. Masses of people acquired direct access to the scriputures. Attitudes began to change as people were relieved from church domination.

Similarly, agents of change are driving a new paradigm shift today. The signs are all around us. For example, the introduction of the personal computer and the internet have impacted both personal and business environments, and is a catalyst for a Paradigm Shift. We are shifting from a mechanistic, manufacturing, industrial society to an organic, service based, information centered society, and increases in technology will continue to impact globally. Change is inevitable. It's the only true constant.

In conclusion, for millions of years we have been evolving and will continue to do so. Change is difficult. Human Beings resist change; however, the process has been set in motion long ago and we will continue to co-create our own experience. Kuhn states that "awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory" (p. 67). It all begins in the mind of the person. What we perceive, whether normal or metanormal, conscious or unconscious, are subject to the limitations and distortions produced by our inherited and socially conditional nature. However, we are not restricted by this for we can change. We are moving at an accelerated rate of speed and our state of consciousness is transforming and transcending. Many are awakening as our conscious awareness expands.


References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://www.taketheleap.com/define.html
http://managementhelp.org/org_chng/org_chng.htm#anchor61645
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dau/roberts.pdf
http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/rationalization.html