Experience brings a distinct advantage in the form of “real” understanding unmatched by any PPT. CIO has a responsibility to drive change in the organization. This post is looking back to what drove some significant “changes”, what have changed and where are they being resisted.
1. 1960-70 : Any requirement to telephone involved a workflow. There was always a sweet voiced Ms.Mary – the telephone operator. Request her for your connection and then you speak. The same process is followed with some unknown Mr.Operator, to make outstation calls (trunk-calls). Nothing much is needed as knowledge from the requester. No need to remember any STD code or extension number. Operators even assisted in telephone directory look-up.
THIS GOT CHANGED. There is no need to expand how calls are made – Speed dialing, voice dialing etc.!
REMOVING Ms.MARY and Mr. OPERATOR from JOB has happened. CHANGE lead to extinction of job roles.
2. 1980-90 : As a student in Bombay, planning to travel to Hyderabad on holidays required an early morning travel to Bombay-VT. Stand in queue for 4-6 hrs and get the train ticket booking. Often, to celebrate the success, it is followed by a nice lunch in Church-Gate and a movie!
THIS GOT CHANGED. Faster than completing this Blog post, a ticket can be booked from any origin to any destination in India, online!
QUANTUM CHANGE IN SOLUTION EFFECTIVENESS (1000 times) THOUGH PROPER TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION caused this.
3. 1990-95 : Trading in Bombay Stock Exchange or Madras Stock Exchange needed a broker. Paper applications, documents of shares, etc. was norm. No two share certificates carry same spelling of the name! There was no need to worry about Income-Tax. Unless disclosed, it can be never found (many shares were on some Shriikant’s name, thanks to the Gujarati influence on BSE!)
THIS GOT CHANGED. Income Tax Department issued the Unique PAN Card. REGULATIONS were strictly enforced for PAN CARD to do transactions. DMAT accounts came in and NAME of HOLDER is no more someone’s fancy! Income Tax department can track all transactions and so, it is necessary to file the income returns from market transactions.
NEW GUIDELINES (LAWS) AND GOVERNANCE has done this. TECHNOLOGY assisted the LAW and its GOVERNANCE mechanism.
Any Successful long-term Business Transformation and consequent will entail these 3 things.
i. Some tasks becoming redundant and roles removed <What is not needed, expunge>
ii. Designing and building new effective methods with QUANTUM improvements <Make all needed tasks many times efficient and easy>
a. Ease of learning and use (adaptation)
b. Expansion of scope (applicability)
c. Addressing known, emerging and new aspects (assimilation - integration)
iii. Stipulating critical and essential regulatory controls and effective governance of them
If these aspects do not dominate any thought process of CHANGE, think what else have been driver of change in your experience and examine for them.
With every CHANGE, a work practice, job position or service method has undergone RADICAL transformation. It is imprudent to seek an operator to connect a telephone call today!
In organizational IT, many practices evolved and developed as standard way of working. CHANGES to the computer technology, software architecture, usage and cost structure has severely undermined many of these practices. I will list some for your thought and can discuss them later.
i. Strict review and audit of proposals for workstations, storage and network
ii. Keeping a team of “programmers” to help professionals to do standard improvements
iii. Preparing a monumental “Requirement Document” and specifications for new information systems
iv. Return-on-Investment (Cost-Benefit) justification for Information System proposals
v. Swearing in packaged vanilla applications that cost in millions (Specifically in Oil&Gas technical space)
vi. Creating and storing 100s of versions of the management presentation as it develops
vii. Getting excited with every new software for an application
viii. Trusting the mouse!
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