Factors in IT Change

Information Technology changes happen for a number of completely different reasons, push factors are internal and environmental factors which determine change in order to maintain the status of the organisation. Pull Factors are led from a desire to improve the organisation:

Push: Legal Requirements: Compliance and Fraud

Corporate governance legislation to avoid money laundering, encourage compliance and deter fraud like the USA Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA) or Sarbox, European country requirements which require the logging of certain types of financial transactions for audit purposes and anti tax avoidance,

Push: Legal Requirements: Tax Avoidance

European country requirements which require the logging of certain types of financial transactions for audit purposes and anti tax avoidance.

Push: Meeting Particular Physical Changes

Converting systems to be Year-2000 compliant, conversion of data formats, like the introduction of character code changes like the move from ASCII character sets to the more modern Unicode versions 2.0 3.0 and then 4.0.

Push: Addressing Organisational Complexity

Over time, organisations become increasingly complex due to the backlog of transactions that is built up, a history of what has happened. This is similar to the complexity that builds up in societies which are very old. Italy for example has been around since the Romans, and there are still remnants of Roman buildings from 2000 years ago in Italy. New Zealand for example has only been industrialising since 1840 after the treaty of Waitangi.

Businesses can be like societies. With this history comes a complexity which becomes more expensive to manage. Organisations therefore need to respond to the complexity challenge, and amend the way that they organise in order to manage this complexity.

Responses to complexity involve the abstraction of the problems and the formalising of the abstractions into service and product contracts so that a business can concentrate on its core complexities.

This continual process of absraction and packaging is required in order to keep a business running smoothly.

Of particular concern is the mushrooming of independent systems for managing data. Every organisation develops pools of extra data in unpredictable ways. These pools of data need to be managed locally at first. As time goes by, the data may require sophisticated data managment systems to keep the organisation running smoothly. Eventually a situation is reached where the cost of interface and upgrade maintenance reaches a point where it is more efficient to start again and build the systems up from the ground.

Meeting Particular Environmental Changes

Events like the conflict between the USA/Israel and the Arabs have heightened international tensions recently, which is likely to bring in new requirements related to security as countries and organisations are increasingly put on a war footing.

Pull: Targets for Increasing Business Performance

The desire to meet standards, such as gaining certification like ISO9000, ISO9001, or meeting six-sigma error processing directives.

Pull: New Business Models and Markets

New business models provide the incentive to invest in supporting new technology.

Push and Pull: New Technology

New Technology provides the opportunity for new business models, but also provides changes in environmental factors which can require changes anyway. An example of this second point is the security concern of wireless networks.

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