MIS 2 Assignment 3: Frustrations of IS Professionals(1of2)
{ Posted on 1:39 PM
by Ariel Serenado
}
What are the two most frequently experienced causes of frustration of IS professionals and users while working on an IS plan?
In most of the report and sharing discussions with Sir Gamboa, it is a requirement that one must adopt a company and relate the theories of the topic assigned to the related activities of the company. Since, in S.A.D 1 we needed to adopt a company for sharing purposes, I grabbed this opportunity to ask the above-stated question to the MIS Head or to the IS Professional. Fortunately, we were not rejected by the MIS Head with our request for RSG was once his instructor when he is still in college. And we consider it an advantage, for at least he understand that our company visit is very substantial.
We visited the AMS Group of Companies located at F. Torres St., Davao City. To answer the question, we approached Mr. Gemrald R. Glibara, the M.I.S Department Head of AMS Group of Companies.
First, let’s define FRUSTRATIONS. As wikipedia stated, it is a common response to opposition, it arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of individual will. In people, internal frustration may arise from challenges in fulfilling personal goals and desires, instinctual drives and needs, or dealing with perceived deficiencies, such as a lack of confidence or fear of social situations. Now, as stated by Mr. Gemrald that there are two frequently experienced causes of frustrations of IS professional and users while working on an IS plan. Let’s discuss it one by one.
Lack of Support / Resistant to changes
Mr. Gemrald is working on the automation of manual systems of the HR Department of the company and developing the enterprise systems for the company, aside form being the Head of office he is also working as the project manager of the MIS department and the Developer. According to him, in any organization you cannot expect that all are adaptive to changes which he consider that as one of the frustrations as an IT professional. It is really hard to purse IS plans when the users themselves resist for changes, that’s the challenging part of being a project manager. You cannot please everyone, he added.
Some sources have identified the reasons of an individual being resistant to changes – organizational and technological change. These include the following:
• THE RISK OF CHANGE IS SEEN AS GREATER THAN THE RISK OF STANDING STILL. Making a change requires a kind of leap of faith: you decide to move in the direction of the unknown on the promise that something will be better for you. But you have no proof. Taking that leap of faith is risky, and people will only take active steps toward the unknown if they genuinely believe – and perhaps more importantly, feel – that the risks of standing still are greater than those of moving forward in a new direction. Making a change is all about managing risk. If you are making the case for change, be sure to set out in stark, truthful terms why you believe the risk situation favors change. Use numbers whenever you can, because we in the West pay attention to numbers. At the very least, they get our attention, and then when the rational mind is engaged, the emotional mind (which is typically most decisive) can begin to grapple with the prospect of change. But if you only sell your idea of change based on idealistic, unseen promises of reward, you won’t be nearly as effective in moving people to action
• PEOPLE HAVE NO ROLE MODELS FOR THE NEW ACTIVITY. Never underestimate the power of observational learning. If you see yourself as a change agent, you probably are something of a dreamer, someone who uses the imagination to create new possibilities that do not currently exist. Well, most people don’t operate that way. It’s great to be a visionary, but communicating a vision is not enough. Get some people on board with your idea, so that you or they can demonstrate how the new way can work. Operationally, this can mean setting up effective pilot programs that model a change and work out the kinks before taking your innovation “on the road.” For most people, seeing is believing. Less rhetoric and more demonstration can go a long way toward overcoming resistance, changing people’s objections from the “It can’t be done!” variety to the “How can we get it done?” category.
• PEOPLE FEAR THEY LACK THE COMPETENCE TO CHANGE. This is a fear people will seldom admit. But sometimes, change in organizations necessitates changes in skills, and some people will feel that they won’t be able to make the transition very well. They don’t think they, as individuals, can do it. The hard part is that some of them may be right. But in many cases, their fears will be unfounded, and that’s why part of moving people toward change requires you to be an effective motivator. Even more, a successful change campaign includes effective new training programs, typically staged from the broad to the specific. By this I mean that initial events should be town-hall type information events, presenting the rationale and plan for change, specifying the next steps, outlining future communications channels for questions, etc., and specifying how people will learn the specifics of what will be required of them, from whom, and when. Then, training programs must be implemented and evaluated over time. In this way, you can minimize the initial fear of a lack of personal competence for change by showing how people will be brought to competence throughout the change process. Then you have to deliver.
• PEOPLE HAVE A HEALTHY SKEPTICISM AND WANT TO BE SURE NEW IDEAS ARE SOUND. It’s important to remember that few worthwhile changes are conceived in their final, best form at the outset. Healthy skeptics perform an important social function: to vet the change idea or process so that it can be improved upon along the road to becoming reality. So listen to your skeptics, and pay attention, because some percentage of what they have to say will prompt genuine improvements to your change idea (even if some of the criticism you will hear will be based more on fear and anger than substance).
• PEOPLE FEAR HIDDEN AGENDAS AMONG WOULD-BE REFORMERS. Let’s face it, reformers can be a motley lot. Not all are to be trusted. Perhaps even more frightening, some of the worst atrocities modern history has known were begun by earnest people who really believed they knew what was best for everyone else. Reformers, as a group, share a blemished past . . . And so, you can hardly blame those you might seek to move toward change for mistrusting your motives, or for thinking you have another agenda to follow shortly. If you seek to promote change in an organization, not only can you expect to encounter resentment for upsetting the established order and for thinking you know better than everyone else, but you may also be suspected of wanted to increase your own power, or even eliminate potential opposition through later stages of change.
• PEOPLE FEEL THE PROPOSED CHANGE THREATENS THEIR NOTIONS OF THEMSELVES. Sometimes change on the job gets right to a person’s sense of identity. When a factory worker begins to do less with her hands and more with the monitoring of automated instruments, she may lose her sense of herself as a craftsperson, and may genuinely feel that the very things that attracted her to the work in the first place have been lost. I saw this among many medical people and psychologists during my graduate training, as the structures of medical reimbursement in this country changed in favor of the insurance companies, HMO’s and managed care organizations. Medical professionals felt they had less say in the treatment of their patients, and felt answerable to less well trained people in the insurance companies to approve treatments the doctors felt were necessary. And so, the doctors felt they had lost control of their profession, and lost the ability to do what they thought best for patients.
• PEOPLE ANTICIPATE A LOSS OF STATUS OR QUALITY OF LIFE. Real change reshuffles the deck a bit. Reshuffling the deck can bring winners . . . and losers. Some people, most likely, will gain in status, job security, quality of life, etc. with the proposed change, and some will likely lose a bit. Change does not have to be a zero sum game, and change can (and should) bring more advantage to more people than disadvantage. But we all live in the real world, and let’s face it – if there were no obstacles (read: people and their interests) aligned against change, then special efforts to promote change would be unnecessary.
In most of the report and sharing discussions with Sir Gamboa, it is a requirement that one must adopt a company and relate the theories of the topic assigned to the related activities of the company. Since, in S.A.D 1 we needed to adopt a company for sharing purposes, I grabbed this opportunity to ask the above-stated question to the MIS Head or to the IS Professional. Fortunately, we were not rejected by the MIS Head with our request for RSG was once his instructor when he is still in college. And we consider it an advantage, for at least he understand that our company visit is very substantial.
We visited the AMS Group of Companies located at F. Torres St., Davao City. To answer the question, we approached Mr. Gemrald R. Glibara, the M.I.S Department Head of AMS Group of Companies.
First, let’s define FRUSTRATIONS. As wikipedia stated, it is a common response to opposition, it arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of individual will. In people, internal frustration may arise from challenges in fulfilling personal goals and desires, instinctual drives and needs, or dealing with perceived deficiencies, such as a lack of confidence or fear of social situations. Now, as stated by Mr. Gemrald that there are two frequently experienced causes of frustrations of IS professional and users while working on an IS plan. Let’s discuss it one by one.
Lack of Support / Resistant to changes
Mr. Gemrald is working on the automation of manual systems of the HR Department of the company and developing the enterprise systems for the company, aside form being the Head of office he is also working as the project manager of the MIS department and the Developer. According to him, in any organization you cannot expect that all are adaptive to changes which he consider that as one of the frustrations as an IT professional. It is really hard to purse IS plans when the users themselves resist for changes, that’s the challenging part of being a project manager. You cannot please everyone, he added.
Some sources have identified the reasons of an individual being resistant to changes – organizational and technological change. These include the following:
• THE RISK OF CHANGE IS SEEN AS GREATER THAN THE RISK OF STANDING STILL. Making a change requires a kind of leap of faith: you decide to move in the direction of the unknown on the promise that something will be better for you. But you have no proof. Taking that leap of faith is risky, and people will only take active steps toward the unknown if they genuinely believe – and perhaps more importantly, feel – that the risks of standing still are greater than those of moving forward in a new direction. Making a change is all about managing risk. If you are making the case for change, be sure to set out in stark, truthful terms why you believe the risk situation favors change. Use numbers whenever you can, because we in the West pay attention to numbers. At the very least, they get our attention, and then when the rational mind is engaged, the emotional mind (which is typically most decisive) can begin to grapple with the prospect of change. But if you only sell your idea of change based on idealistic, unseen promises of reward, you won’t be nearly as effective in moving people to action
• PEOPLE HAVE NO ROLE MODELS FOR THE NEW ACTIVITY. Never underestimate the power of observational learning. If you see yourself as a change agent, you probably are something of a dreamer, someone who uses the imagination to create new possibilities that do not currently exist. Well, most people don’t operate that way. It’s great to be a visionary, but communicating a vision is not enough. Get some people on board with your idea, so that you or they can demonstrate how the new way can work. Operationally, this can mean setting up effective pilot programs that model a change and work out the kinks before taking your innovation “on the road.” For most people, seeing is believing. Less rhetoric and more demonstration can go a long way toward overcoming resistance, changing people’s objections from the “It can’t be done!” variety to the “How can we get it done?” category.
• PEOPLE FEAR THEY LACK THE COMPETENCE TO CHANGE. This is a fear people will seldom admit. But sometimes, change in organizations necessitates changes in skills, and some people will feel that they won’t be able to make the transition very well. They don’t think they, as individuals, can do it. The hard part is that some of them may be right. But in many cases, their fears will be unfounded, and that’s why part of moving people toward change requires you to be an effective motivator. Even more, a successful change campaign includes effective new training programs, typically staged from the broad to the specific. By this I mean that initial events should be town-hall type information events, presenting the rationale and plan for change, specifying the next steps, outlining future communications channels for questions, etc., and specifying how people will learn the specifics of what will be required of them, from whom, and when. Then, training programs must be implemented and evaluated over time. In this way, you can minimize the initial fear of a lack of personal competence for change by showing how people will be brought to competence throughout the change process. Then you have to deliver.
• PEOPLE HAVE A HEALTHY SKEPTICISM AND WANT TO BE SURE NEW IDEAS ARE SOUND. It’s important to remember that few worthwhile changes are conceived in their final, best form at the outset. Healthy skeptics perform an important social function: to vet the change idea or process so that it can be improved upon along the road to becoming reality. So listen to your skeptics, and pay attention, because some percentage of what they have to say will prompt genuine improvements to your change idea (even if some of the criticism you will hear will be based more on fear and anger than substance).
• PEOPLE FEAR HIDDEN AGENDAS AMONG WOULD-BE REFORMERS. Let’s face it, reformers can be a motley lot. Not all are to be trusted. Perhaps even more frightening, some of the worst atrocities modern history has known were begun by earnest people who really believed they knew what was best for everyone else. Reformers, as a group, share a blemished past . . . And so, you can hardly blame those you might seek to move toward change for mistrusting your motives, or for thinking you have another agenda to follow shortly. If you seek to promote change in an organization, not only can you expect to encounter resentment for upsetting the established order and for thinking you know better than everyone else, but you may also be suspected of wanted to increase your own power, or even eliminate potential opposition through later stages of change.
• PEOPLE FEEL THE PROPOSED CHANGE THREATENS THEIR NOTIONS OF THEMSELVES. Sometimes change on the job gets right to a person’s sense of identity. When a factory worker begins to do less with her hands and more with the monitoring of automated instruments, she may lose her sense of herself as a craftsperson, and may genuinely feel that the very things that attracted her to the work in the first place have been lost. I saw this among many medical people and psychologists during my graduate training, as the structures of medical reimbursement in this country changed in favor of the insurance companies, HMO’s and managed care organizations. Medical professionals felt they had less say in the treatment of their patients, and felt answerable to less well trained people in the insurance companies to approve treatments the doctors felt were necessary. And so, the doctors felt they had lost control of their profession, and lost the ability to do what they thought best for patients.
• PEOPLE ANTICIPATE A LOSS OF STATUS OR QUALITY OF LIFE. Real change reshuffles the deck a bit. Reshuffling the deck can bring winners . . . and losers. Some people, most likely, will gain in status, job security, quality of life, etc. with the proposed change, and some will likely lose a bit. Change does not have to be a zero sum game, and change can (and should) bring more advantage to more people than disadvantage. But we all live in the real world, and let’s face it – if there were no obstacles (read: people and their interests) aligned against change, then special efforts to promote change would be unnecessary.
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