Greet Change with a Healthy Dose of Skepticism

We've all heard the cliches surrounding change - almost all of them trumpet the need to embrace change as a purely positive part of business growth and development. However, a recent study by the IT Process Institute makes a strong case for tightening the reigns on unbridled changes in the IT enterprise.

In a recent issue of CIO, Michael Schrage, co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative, points out the change management is really process management and change leadership is really process leadership, whether you're talking about people, systems, or applications.

Schrage points out that, in the IT Process Institute survey, those who took process leadership most seriously didn't just perform a little better than the median - they delivered results seven or eight times better! More projects, more applications and software, more IT services, and more business IT changes - with half the failure rate. So, what was the key difference the survey identified in this elite group of performers?

Foundational controls.

Bottom line - this group of performers rigorously monitors and punishes unauthorized changes. As Schrage states, "What kills us is not our failures of planning, analysis, design, testing and deployment...It's our black market economies of unauthorized changes - no matter how well intentioned or essential."

Gene Kim, one of the lead researchers for the IT Process Institute, expressed that elite IT organizations didn't see the controls in the change management process as a constraint but a platform for innovation. They found that disciplined design actually proves to be more agile, robust, and maintainable than unauthorized change.

Another benefit? Bigger IT budgets. Kim found the elite organizations with budgets three times larger than median groups. "High performers have continually earned ever increasing budgets because they deliver ever increasing value to the business," said Kim.

It's time to think carefully about unrestrained change. I think in the back of our minds we all know it, but the never-ending fire drill of change is not terribly productive and really isn't good for the business long-term.