Factors prompting change within organisations

or

Reasons why information problems happen

Information problems are not just when something goes wrong. As mentioned elsewhere information problems are better thought of as goals that need to be achieved. These goals can be caused by many factors apart from breakdowns. e.g. your old word processor might still work fine, but you could have an information problem if it's no longer compatible with most other users who have moved on to a different program or version.

What can cause information problems, or prompt change in organisations?

Internal and external factors, including:

• Economic factors
• Social factors (including legal factors)
• Technological factors
• Health & Safety factors (physical, mental)

Tip: Consider these from the perspectives of: individuals, families, departments, organisations, states, countries, globally. e.g. how would a pay rise affect individual employees and the organisation as a whole?

Examples of factors prompting change

• government policy (e.g. Vic government wants each school to have a 1:5 computer/student ratio)
  
• legislation - e.g. a ban on online gambling sites
  
• market trends - e.g. a move towards greater product support via websites
  
• community attitudes, values - e.g. concern about privacy of information
  
• availability & cost of equipment - e.g. when scanners were expensive and rare, only professionals bought them. Now they are cheap, they are commonplace.
• new technologies that require existing systems to be changed (e.g. new operating system)
  
• desire for increased competitiveness - e.g. if rivals are outperforming you, you may need to make changes to stay in the race
  
• concern for health and safety - e.g. monitor radiation, RSI. Most employers do not want to hurt their employees, or get sued for injuries sustained because of unsafe equipment. It may cost $100 to buy a trolley to cart computer systems around, but it could cost $60,000 if an employee sues you for back injuries suffered while lugging heavy equipment about.
  
• a desire to show off
• a change to an organisation's goals
• a need to make better or quicker decisions
• a need for new types of information

Ask yourself: who can be affected?

• Individual employees
• Families
• The organisation and its individual departments
• Competitors, partners
• Customers/clients
• Education system - e.g. the IPM course was a lot smaller before the Internet arrived!
• Public (Local community/ State / National / Global)
• Government (Local / State / National / Global / Neighbours)
• Others?
  

Three main causes of change are economic, social and technological factors.

Economic factors

Money is a powerful incentive to do things. Most of us work to get money. Commercial organisations exist to generate profit.

Information systems might need to be changed because of:

• Economic pressure from outside the organisation

  e.g. tax law changes, tariffs on foreign goods, currency exchange rates, competitors improving their performance, a need for improved efficiency

• Economic pressure from inside the organisation

e.g. falling profits, desire to reduce waste, need to be more competitive, desire to improve quality of service, a need for improved efficiency

Social factors

"Social" factors means people. When talking "social" factors, it can include entire countries, states, cities, towns, households, individuals, organisations, departments.

Social factors can be mind-bogglingly huge (e.g. global unemployment rates) to personal (e.g. a person's desire to increase his IT skills to get a promotion).

Some social factors that could cause change to information systems:

• desire for privacy, e.g. installing a firewall at home, customer complaints about their personal details being stolen from your database
• desire for communication, e.g. mothers wanting to email their children travelling overseas
• lack of time, e.g. you want to spend more time with the family instead of hand-calculating invoices at work
• recreational needs e.g. online gaming, surfing the net, online gambling
• employment, e.g. a government might promote IT companies to provide jobs, an individual may buy software to become skilled enough to increase his/her chances of getting a job
• fear of technology, e.g. if employees are worried about using a complicated system, it might be made easier to use; if old people are scared of using the internet, a website may be changed to make the experience more fun and reassuring; if an operating system is complicated and user-hostile, Microsoft may make it more cute and jolly.
• concerns for health and safety, e.g. the introduction of ergonomic furniture, replacing noisy equipment, providing better mice and keyboards.
• changing family structures, e.g. some people may prefer to work by telecommuting so they can be home with young children.
• pride and ego, e.g. some people like having the best computer system to impress their friends or peers. An organisation may believe having impressive top-notch equipment improves their corporate image.

Technological factors

Each technological development tends to spur further developments. One day, long ago, a stand-alone workstation was connected to another workstation to share data. This local area network (LAN) spurred the development of file servers, hubs, switches, and network operating systems (NOS) such as Novell Netware and Windows NT Server. One day this little LAN was connected to another LAN, forming a wide area network (WAN). WANs spurred the development of equipment such as routers and ISDN cable connections between cities. Eventually the WANs joined to form the internet. The internet gave rise to increased satellites, ISPs, new police squads to combat internet crime, browser wars, and email, which spread viruses, which cripples networks, which stops workstations from getting on the internet... and so on. Each development may have dozens of spinoff benefits and curses.

Computer power and file sizes:
a rambling and sometimes accurate personal history of computers

In 1980 your favourite word processor could fit on a floppy disk and documents were measured in kilobytes. In those days, of course, you were pretty sophisticated if you could afford a floppy disk drive. They were very expensive (about $1000 for my first computer - a Tandy TRS-80 with 4K of RAM proudly purchased in 1978.) Most of us "diskless" souls saved files to a cassette recorder. Yep. You had Led Zeppelin on one side and Microchess on the other. Ah those were the days... anyway.

Document sizes were restricted by the size of available media. Files were rarely allowed to exceed 360K - even if you could imagine a file of such monstrous size - because 360K was the most you could fit on a 5.25 floppy disk. Word processor files did not have graphics: the PC's memory could not cope with graphics. Anyway, the old monochrome monitors of the day could not show colour and their resolution was about 100 x 200 pixels (if you had a high resolution screen) so "graphics" were chunky pictures. Many people used portable TV sets as their monitors. It was very hard to create a big file!

One day along comes CGA monitors: the first colour displays. Yes - the colour was pretty nasty but it was colour. Now: the coming of colour meant extra memory was required to store the colour information. File sizes got bigger too because of extra storage space required to store colour information.

Disk capacity increased from 360K to 1.2M in the 5.25" format. The hard-shell 3.5" disk appeared, capable of holding 720K and later 1.44M. Files could be bigger. Colour monitors encouraged game programmers to create more interesting (and bigger) programs. The demanding games prodded the use of more sophisticated graphics cards. The Asian markets, particularly the Japanese, were keen to develop high resolution graphics to display their alphabets properly, so companies like Hitachi and Sony pushed hard to develop very high resolution monitors and video cards.

CPU speeds were doubling every 18 months - whether this was driven by the increased demands of software, or whether software got more powerful because the CPUs became more powerful is a debatable point. The probably fed off each other. With greater CPU power, programmers built more features into software. Word Processors started getting spell checkers, menus, fonts - all in DOS.

The programs started to overflow one high density floppy disk. PKWare, who invented the popularised disk compression, developed "disk spanning" so a program could be zipped over several floppy disks. Floppy disk users realised how slow it was to load a massive program from floppy and started hankering for hard disks - again, they were very expensive (and again, I couldn't afford one. By this time I had an Hitachi Peach. The year was about 1982, and the IBM PC was just about to break onto the world scene.)

Once hard disks started appearing, market demand was slow at first because of their cost: about $2000 for some hard disks. Prices started falling as manufacturers improved the technology. The early 10 megabyte hard disks became 20M. My first step into the world of IBM-compatible PCs had a huge 80M hard disk in 1985. Fifteen years later a biggish hard disk is about 20G: 250 times bigger than my first hard disk. I never did end up filling up that 80M disk. At the time it seemed so big it would never get filled. Today my PC has a 20G and 40G hard disks and I occasionally look at the ads to see what's available...

As hard disks got bigger, games and other programs could get bigger and better. Sound cards were needed to replace the horrible "beep beep squawk" that came from the PC speaker when playing "Captain Keen". Graphics cards went from 200 pixels width to 1024 and still growing. Monitors jumped from CGA to VGA to XGA and will soon be all active TFT or plasma. Processors have gone from 1MHz for the Apple II to firebreathing 1,400Mhz. Memory has jumped from a spacious 4K to a monstrous 256M. The new version of Windows XP is said to prefer 256M - remember when you needed 16M for Windows 95?

The operating system of my first computer was stored in a 4K ROM. It didn't actually have an operating system, actually. It had a programming language. All computer operations were performed through BASIC commands. The operating systems in those days were text commands - such as CP/M and DOS. Command line operation was hard to learn but easy to fit into a tiny amount of RAM. Most people never learned it. They simply didn't use computers. In those days they didn't need to. Hardly any small businesses had computers.

Then came the Graphical User Interface (GUI) also known as WIMP (windows, icons, mouse pointer). Developed by Palo Alto Research, stolen by Apple for the Lisa and the Macintosh, restolen by Microsoft to create Windows, this was an operating system for everyone who couldn't remember a simple command like DIR c:\*.* /s /b /ogn|more>>prn:

Wussies!

These GUI operating systems pushed existing hardware to the limit. PCs needed more memory, bigger CPUs, mice, sound cards, VGA monitors. You could hear the noise as computer parts were thrown out the window and replaced with new components that could handle Windows.

The arrival of Windows 95 made the internet far easier to connect to. The internet mushroomed as millions of people got online. Email became commonplace. Every business now has a web page if it wants to survive. Internet URLs are as common as logos on all sorts of products. Shopping habits are changing. Social relationships are changing as people encounter others from all over the world. If you ask me, the greatest hope for world peace and understanding is likely to be caused by the internet. People can now publish ideas to a global audience: frustrated writers are no longer frustrated. Publishing is changing. The music industry is certainly changing. Education is changing. Work is changing. All God's children are changing.

And it all started so small, just a few years ago. Each technological development above has sparked many more developments, which will in turn create more changes: socially, economically and technologically.

Issues and Effects

Causes and effects of change to information systems

If there's one thing you can count on in the IT industry, it's change. Often when one change happens, it will cause further changes in turn. These changes cause more changes. The changes are continuous and often cause a feedback loop that end up changing the original change, and speed up the process of change.

IT is becoming harder to keep up with than medicine. So, what sparks change? And what are some of the effects of change?

Effects of changing information systems

Effects of change can be small, medium or large. They can be short-term, long-term or permanent. They can affect individuals, families, organisations, nations, the entire world (and perhaps beyond!)

Any change to an information system has good and bad implications and side effects. I dare say there has never been a change that has been 100% benefit. If nothing else, change will usually always cost money for hardware, software, training, documentation, errors or reduced productivity during the "settling in" phase, or consultancy.

As you will discover, however, the implications of change go way beyond money (economic implications). The other main issue is the social implications.

Social implications of change

Economic Implications of change

Health and Safety Effects of Change