Experiences of SISP: Evoking Change within an IT Department

This chapter explores change management issues affecting participants involved in a SISP process. The field study is based on the early phases of an SISP exercise conducted in a major engineering company, named Engco in order to maintain confidentiality. The work is focused on the process of raising SISP awareness. This involves repositioning an IT department (one primarily concerned with the provision of a resilient network technology infrastructure), enabling it to take a more pro-active and balanced Information Systems (IS) role, (concerned with developing IS applications prioritised to business needs) ready to cope with the increased pressures of adopting a higher internal organisational and strategic profile. These pressures now seem to be prevalent amongst industry, the alignment of IT and business objectives remaining a top management concern over seven consecutive years of the Price Waterhouse IT Review (Price Waterhouse, 1995–6). Two typical quotes from this report (from the section ‘managing the IT infrastructure’) succinctly identifies the problems related to the IT/business/top management culture gap: Mentioned by 35%, and not the biggest issue, but surely the biggest disappointment, is the non-recognition, by top management, of the importance of the IT infrastructure. Just when we thought IT was finding its place as one of the key, long term, strategies to get right, the reflection of that strategy, which manifests itself far more in the infrastructure than in any transient application, seems to pass unnoticed.