Change Management in Information Services

Lyndon Pugh

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138713659
• eBook ISBN: 9781351773195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: An overview of change management and organizational theories. The book explores the strategies normally associated with them and presents real solutions to real problems for services spanning the academic, public and commercial sectors. Through a series of case studies, the book shows how different organizations and personal issues need equally different approaches to managing them. The author demonstrates how discrete change projects can be modelled, implemented and reviewed and explains the advantages and disadvantages of various organizational structures in managing change. He takes a candid look at what really makes teams tick or malfunction and, focusing particularly on people issues, suggests how adapting management styles and providing training can help to meet the demands of change.

1

THE NATURE OF CHANGE

Change in library and information services is now different in nature and greater in extent than ever before. This is not surprising in that the sector has, until the last decade or so, always represented a stable and perhaps unchanging mien, and maybe it has been a little slow to take up some of the innovative approaches to management that have been tried and tested in other spheres for some time. It is now grappling with the consequences of multiple change. The hotchpotch of ideas and principles which turned into modem change management only began to cohere around the emerging discipline of organisation development in the 1970s, although much of what is called change management, if there is such a discipline, can be traced back to the 1940s. Burns and Stalker’s (1961) ground-breaking work on the management of innovation was but one reflection of what was happening elsewhere, but much later than this Lynch (1979) found libraries to be still bureaucratic, and even later Dougherty and Heinritz (1982) considered libraries to be ideal organisations for the application of scientific management theories. While innovation certainly demands some of the strengths of scientific management, such as systematic analysis, this particular theory is hardly a universal recipe for managing in times of change.

To take another example, the early automation systems had arguably little impact outside the boundaries of the conventional housekeeping systems they replaced. Organisational structures have been slow to move in step with technological changes, and the new systems were for the most part contained within the orbit and influence of specialised systems librarians, so the changes contributed little to improving the skills base of the majority of the workforce, apart from basic practical familiarity. When it is considered that some libraries were automating their systems in the late 1960s and yet it took the collision of a number of ideas about technology and other issues in the mid-to-late 1980s to begin to produce holistic change as a result of technology, then the point is well made.

Although there is some disagreement, the lack of significant change in such areas as management styles and organisational structures is a steady motif from Lantz and Eastcott’s pinpointing of the prevalence of authoritarian styles of management (1986) up to Day’s comment that much greater emphasis could be placed on automation as an agent of change in structures and behaviours (1995). The refrain is underscored by many writers in between and a few since.

Evans (1991) found some evidence that many public library structures were still hierarchical, although with the gradual emergence of organic features on the ground. She also saw a form of market driven decentralisation occurring alongside devolution of responsibility, and commented on the growing predilection for flatter structures on the part of chief librarians. The influence of the political process, the existence of special interest groups, changing relationships with government and the problems associated with strategic planning in an uncertain environment will all ring bells in other sectors as well.

The changes facing library and information services are unknown and unquantifiable. In a very real sense there is no such thing as change management. While we might try to project current trends into the future, we cannot predict the form of the challenges that will face libraries. So it is not a case of managing change. It is more a matter of organising ourselves to cope with anything that might come along. If this sounds haphazard, in practice it should be very far from it. It means thinking about organisations that make the best possible use of all available resources, particularly the people that work in them. It means creating organisations that encourage personal development, that place learning at the heart of their operations, that possess systems which enable people to share responsibilities and workloads, which can change priorities quickly, which still place the service to the user first and which work on trust and giving responsibility rather than centralising and controlling. Specifically, it means real teams, real changes in management styles and leadership, real structural change, decentralisation and new ways of looking at education and training.

CHARACTERISTICS OF CHANGE

Within a period of just over 10 years, the need to manage change in information services has assumed a high degree of urgency as organisations seek ways of dealing with developments which demand a response across the whole panorama of management. Following a long period when libraries went through comparatively little organisational change, and when most change was incremental, there are some characteristics which sharpen the challenge posed by the present period of change, and which make the current task of management different in nature from management tasks even a decade ago.

DISCONTINUOUS CHANGE

First, the changes are unlike any others ever faced before by libraries. They are what some management theorists call discontinuous. This means that they are not always amenable to the standard managerial responses and they require new ways of thinking about organisations.

This is not the same as revolutionary change, which can be any change designed to produce results quickly; nor is it the kind of ‘step change’ which in itself can bring about a huge shift in the way in which an organisation behaves, although there may be elements of these kinds of change in the information services’ environment. Discontinuous change embraces a distinguishable break with past practice, and requires the recognition that the former ways of doing things will not create and sustain successful organisations, particularly in the information sector, which now embraces a vast area of activity. It is therefore a form of change for which there is no template in previous experience, no model of the process and as yet no consensus about how change should be handled. The obvious example of this at the moment is what was in its inception the mostly Anglo-Saxon idea, in spite of early work in South Africa, of the converged management of academic support services in higher education. Here there is still something short of agreement about organisational forms, the extent of convergence or indeed, for a minority of managers, the validity of the concept (Pugh, 1997). That convergence is now being occasionally undone, surreptitiously in some institutions and with blatant panache in others, is no surprise.

Another way of looking at this is to consider the difference between incremental change and fundamental change (Beckhard and Pritchard, 1991). Incremental change builds on everything an organisation has done before, whether it is the structures, the ethos, the culture, the management style, the decision-making process or any other aspect of organisational life.

Most change in library services was of this kind until the last 10 to 15 years. Since then, change has been fundamental in the sense that libraries have faced the need to modify old behaviours and learn new ones, and to accomplish this in ways which actually challenge and alter the norms and procedures that the organisations have relied on. This challenge occurs because in information services today’s changes are driven so much by technological imperatives, with all the uncertainty and volatility these bring to the process.

DIVERSITY

A form of discontinuous change is seen in the emergence of organisations which span different cultures and modus operandi. It imposes the requirement to manage disparate parts of what are new organisations, but to manage in ways which create unity without uniformity and which allow diversity to flourish within a common ethos and to a common end. Perhaps the best example of this is the convergence referred to above, but it also exists in public library systems which have gone through their own forms of convergence as they became key components in enlarged leisure services or cultural services. Looking at some of the emerging patterns in public library systems, where there can be new alliances of libraries, business information services, archives, museums, public information and learning support services, some of the resulting organisational forms are even more complex than our large academic systems. Theoretically, if not yet so obviously in practice, newer and different organisations like Business Links also have the opportunity to develop the boundary-spanning approaches that will be seen in the best organisational forms of the future, and which already exist in many specialist information units.

These organisations, in whatever sector of information services, face the most difficult task of managing, under one umbrella, cultures which are different and some would say mismatched. They also need to forge a new culture which supports many interesting features. They will be organisations which encourage variety and yet subscribe to a common vision, aims and objectives. They will seek above all to absorb and reflect ideas about the continuum of information in whatever form it is presented and breathe life into ideas about connections between hitherto distinct areas. They will develop structures and systems which reflect these things. The development of the electronic and digital library, cross-sectoral network based initiatives and other enterprises will increase the need for a new approach to most things managers do in and to information services. New combinations of skills will have to exist side by side with specialisation, and workplace learning in many different forms will provide the organisational foundations. In short, for the first time since the development of the great library bureaucracies we will be looking for a new theory of how to manage information services, and specifically for a theory to guide the management of the electronic library.

As managers we also will learn new skills and deploy new techniques. The organisational centre, or if you like the top of what remains of the pyramid, will be smaller but will draw its strength from operating in a different way.

Control will increasingly be replaced by empowerment or by any fashionable variation of the term. Where regulation is needed it will come from features other than structures and procedures: managers’ use of information and the access to information and the use of it by a wider range of other people in the organisation will be some examples.

This will reinforce the idea of the organisation as an information system in a very broad sense. As people work more and more in teams the essential supporting structure will come at least partly from the use of technology to create an open information network.

Management will be based on providing information about the entire organisation and in return knowing how this information is being used and what is happening as it is being applied. This will raise issues about our management styles, how we structure our organisations, how we educate, train, select, deploy, appraise and support our staff, what physical form our libraries will take and perhaps in the end whether or not there are libraries at all in the sense we understand. This is the arena where ideas about knowledge management and other novel ways of looking at organisations are likely to be most potent.

MANAGEMENT BEHAVIOUR

Managers have always tended to favour the status quo, and if they are faced with change they very sensibly prefer it to be incremental. They display an inbuilt tendency to rely on what they know, what has been successful in the past, and what they learnt in order to become managers. The problem is that most of us became managers by turning ourselves into clones of the role models that were around at the time, so there are still information services, and parent organisations, which cannot handle the shock of a different management approach. Equally there are some where managers consistently demonstrate the thinking and behaviour which is necessary to accommodate discontinuous change.

The diverse nature of our organisations together with the extent, speed and unpredictability of change, changes in the characteristics of information service staff and other factors mean that diversity will compel managers to adopt new behaviour patterns. The bureaucratic ideas of regulating people and setting and maintaining standards through a command and control style of management will increasingly be questioned. The questioning will be done by staff, and managers, who recognise that managing in times of change will be better accomplished by sharing, educating and coaching. They will change themselves by further developing their people management skills in order to change others. Motivating, leading, teamwork, organisational learning and organisation development will be the keys.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Any attempt to seriously predict the course and implications of technological change is facile and amounts to no more than uttering platitudes. Technological innovation is not just part of the solution to change management in information services: it is also part of the problem, in that it has already posed huge challenges as well as enormous benefits, and it cannot be planned for:

I heard someone back in 1994 talking about telecommunications who said ‘In the next six years we will have more technological change than we had in the last ninety-four.’ And he was right of course. The rate of change in all technological areas will continue to increase. (Hammer, 1996)

Technological advances are clearly going to increase the unpredictability of the environment in a number of ways which we will look at later, but technology is also providing many solutions to the problems faced in change management. This is seen clearly in the potential of sophisticated Management Information Systems (MIS) applications in information services. These not only provide the heart of the communications and learning system, but also make possible a huge potential impact on strategic planning, providing that we are also willing to revise our ideas about how strategic planning should take place. Adams et al (1991) report on the early use of modelling techniques at De Montfort. Although this particular development is generally difficult, the use of sophisticated techniques already common in other areas will become the norm. If we also give our staff more skills, more knowledge and better expertise, why reduce the impact of this by declining to give those of them who want it a greater say in policy and strategy? The big question is not how we can use technology to improve our services, but whether we have the percipience to harness it to the task of managing the diverse information-based organisations of the twenty-first century.

This is not to argue for an abdication of managerial responsibility. It is merely to suggest two things: first that a subtle shift in managerial attitudes might well extend and more importantly institutionalise, in the positive sense of the word, something which is already happening to a degree as staff below senior management gradually become involved in issues that were once the exclusive preserve of the executive. Second, it is to drive home the obvious. Enlarging jobs, which is an important part of change management, depends not only on learning new skills but having the opportunity to use them. Redefining the roles of middle managers, and the roles of those who want to become managers, are some of the keys to successful change management. Extending the horizon for at least these groups of staff is a useful component of organisation design.

The other group of staff who will have a large say in the future shape of information services is made up of the super technologists being produced by electronic library developments. High order practitioner research, developmental and technical skills characterise this group. Making use of these attributes will be a challenge for new management.

STRUCTURES

There is a persuasive argument for saying that changes in organisational structures in libraries have been incremental and mostly amounted to playing around with the edges of the bureaucracy. I think this is true even of what were for the time dynamic ideas like matrix management and various earlier flirtations with mbo (management by objectives). Other developments like subject specialisation and many manifestations of teams in library services owe their genesis at least in part to ingenious attempts to ameliorate the worst excesses of the traditional bureaucratic forms, or to try to deal with the problems of dispersed services, whether on an area basis in public libraries or on a campus or subject basis in academic libraries. Teams have been used in a library setting in the UK for almost 30 years, for example, but there are still wide differences in their characteristics and in the degree of responsibility they handle. Structures have also been modified in order to sharpen the focus on the particular needs of discrete groups of users.

Some time ago I was involved in a vigorous discussion with a library manager who said that structure was not important. This could not be further from the truth. An over-reliance on structure as we understand it now can be a problem, but to discount it, even on the wildest and most distant shores of the ultimate electronic library, is folly. The proper management of technology is one thing which moves structural change onto another level. Automation helps in the reduction of hierarchies and the widening of the span of control. Equally it allows the possibility, hinted at earlier, of a radical redefinition of the roles of middle managers, particularly if it is linked to a sophisticated development of team-based organisations. Under these conditions, both structure and technology can be liberating mechanisms because of the improvement in communication they bring. Moreover, technology is one of the keys to transforming the inbuilt inertia of structural monoliths into vital information and communications systems.

It is worth noting that ideas such as empowerment, organisational redesign and restructuring in all its forms have had a certain cachet for managers in industry because of the opportunities they offered for cutting staff costs. Many organisations have been confronted by the real cost of these ideas in quality problems and other issues. For information services, cost-cutting or efficiency gains are a feature of the landscape but if we can avoid treating organisation development as shorthand for the slimming down of emaciated establishments, have a chance to make imaginative use of new structures to support a kind of development which will fit our organisations for coming changes. We can do this without the pain of downsizing, delayering or the other temporary enthusiasms o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Nature of Change
• 2. Change Theories
• 3. Strategies
• 4. Models and Processes
• 5. Structures
• 6. Teams
• 7. Changing Behaviours
• 8. Training, Development and Change
• 9. Motivation
• 10. Conflict and Resistance
• 11. Epilogue
• Bibliography and References
• Appendix: The Checklist
• Index