The five steps that Darlington and BMO employed to sustain company growth may not necessarily be appropriate for companies of all sizes.

A highly centralized IT function that places most IT resources including infrastructure and application development within a central organization where there is tight cost control, high service standards, clear sponsorship by business units, and accountability for outcomes. And this may work best for small and mid-size companies. With large companies, there might arise problems of compatibility and flexibility to changing business needs. Thus is this case its better to use balanced IT function that can be shared by the business units such as network and mainframe services in a central organization and aligns application development with its business units. It is also difficult to adopt this model in a geographically dispersed organization. Although much can be accomplished using the Web and email, a personal visit is often needed. Employees may be reluctant to spend most of their time "on the road."

Standards are the key here. Therefore, I think this step can be applied to all organizations. Organizations that run non-standard systems are faced with several potential issues on an ongoing basis. In fact, the common problems of non-standard IT services are well known today. The first is complexity. If systems and processes are not standardized, then organizations face support challenges. That’s because it is hard to determine where problems lie. In fact, in order to solve a problem, the person troubleshooting it must often reverse engineer the installation to identify what might have gone wrong. In addition, running non-standard systems means that it is impossible to automate their production since everyone has their own way of setting things up. Finally, change is very difficult to manage with non-standard systems because each change must be performed individually because each system uses a diverse configuration.

The fourth step may not be appropriate to all. In small companies, the concept of one-to-one management derived from need theories of motivation is vital because employees are treated like they should treat customers. For example, as employees make customers their number one priority, management will treat them as their number one priority too. Employees are given the choice and freedom to voice their opinions about the company.  The surveys allow them to express their views about change and personal needs that has to be addressed. Employee choices on getting a raise, or other rewards all fall under this category. Upward feedback allows employee the opportunity to provide constructive input about business practices in your work unit.  This process can help build trust with staff, especially if they see their suggestions implemented to make improvements within the department.  Upward “evaluations” can help supervisors assess areas for improvement.

Sometimes employees need that personal connection to the organization and that’s better to them than having a mechanical way of measuring their performance.  For example, Say thank you: Nothing can beat receiving personal thanks when an employee has put in extra effort on a project or achieved a goal that you mutually set.  Immediate, specific acknowledgment (“Thanks for staying late to finish those calculations I needed.  They were critical for my meeting this morning”) lets the employee know what he/she did and why his/her effort was of value.  Such a motivational style cannot be measured because some employees are not motivated by financial rewards.

The fifth step: fix only what is broken. No, that’s not true in this modern world of information age.  The need for change is increasing including change of organizational culture, thus change capability is necessary for organizations that will succeed in the future. Effective corporate culture change must begin with changing mindsets No change can be implemented without first a change in mindset. Successful change management requires: effective communication, full and active executive support, employee involvement, organizational planning and analysis and widespread perceived need for the change. Clearly communicate the vision, the mission, and the objectives of the change effort. Help people to understand how these changes will affect them personally. (If you don’t help with this process, people will make up their own stories, usually more negative than the actual truth.) Therefore, culture change is appropriate in want to remain competitive today.

Disadvantages of locking an entire international organization system into a standardized system are:
1.    Such a system can be quite complex since it does not come with any indications of which processes are more important than others or discern between critical and nice-to-have flows of services or information. As such, it might be difficult for inexperienced users to decide which parts to focus on, especially since it rarely is feasible to include every aspect of the model.

2.    It can be difficult to strike a suitable balance when designing such systems between the desire to include a largest possible number of relevant processes and the need to keep the system relatively simple. If the system is to some extent is so complex that it is not very accessible for novices/trainees in the field, thus normally requiring the use of external assistance with a deeper knowledge of the system. This also makes it more likely that the large majority of the organization will find it difficult to follow the discussions about how the system should be altered to fit this specific case, thus endangering the involvement and sense of ownership for the project.

3.    Beyond the above factors, a key motivation is the continuing shortage of skilled IT staff. But we do see barriers remaining to full deployment of industry-standard system for higher-end applications. Some countries are simply more conservative than the United States in their deployments, and Europe (except to some extent in the United Kingdom) did not experience the kind of growth in Intel-based Internet infrastructures that was seen in the United States; and hence, there was less experience of the growth above running key parts of the infrastructure.

References:
Stair R., Reynolds, G. (2006). “Principles of Information Systems, 7th Ed.” Massacheusset:
                  Thomson Course Tech

Kreitner R. and Kincki A, (2005). Organizational Behavior (6th Ed.). New York, NY:
            McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Optimize Change and Configuration Management With People, Process and Tools. Ronni Colville, Patricia Adams and Kris Brittain. Gartner Research, 3 August 2005