Managing Technochange: Strategy Setting, Risk Assessment and Implementation

In this paper we report the results of a multiple case study aimed at understanding the planning and execution of large IT-related business programs and projects. To distinguish the nature of these efforts from historically smaller systems development projects, Markus refers to the phenomenon of “technochange”: big, technology-driven, technologydependent change seeking significant business benefit and requiring significant organizational change. Analyzing the cases find a relation between strategic decisions, IT related project risk, learning style and execution style used to achieve the required business results. Based on the analysis the paper provides a three step framework and guidelines for setting the context, assessing the degree of risk of achieving business success, and executing. Depending on the level of risk, different learning styles are required that in turn call for advocating different approaches to program/project management, from “stop” to improvisational experimentation to big bang rapid implementation. The framework provides a practice based contingent approach to complex IT projects management. We decided to present this contribution in the Marco De Marco tribute book as it represents in practice the way of thinking of Marco in terms of research development. Marco spent all his academic life, on one hand, in pushing young scholars to work and cooperate at international level and, on the other hand in involving Italian scholars working abroad to be active part of the Italian Information Systems community.