I am currently going through the change management process associated with restructuring the Faculty of Technology and Information Systems at Brunel University, and Time, Change and Paradoxes are as relevant here as for any aspect of IS development.
We cannot know the future (if we could, we act on the information to perturb it …). We can plan for certain things to happen, but the number of unplanned things that happen will be greater. Change would be perfect if Paul's Fixed Point Theorem of IS were true. ‘There comes a time when everyone involved in the system knows what they want and agrees with everyone else’. However, it is not true, so we cannot conveniently seek this fixed point and change to it.
And as Peter Senge said ‘People don’t resist change. They resist being changed’. So, for example, a common line of opposition I hear is ‘The change is too big in one go because xyz’. When I challenged the assertion that xyz is true, I hear ‘in that case the change is so insignificant it's not worth doing’! Why change anyway. My faculty is successful and improving. But so is everyone else. If we change at the same rate, we shall end up here where we are. If we want to be relatively better we have to improve faster. If we stay as we are now, strange paradoxes harm our work. For example,
Paul's Inverse Law of Service Departments: The more people employed in a service department, the greater proportion of time each will spend on communications with other colleagues, and the less on customers. If the number continues to increase, there will come a time when there is no time left for customers. Any further increase in numbers will lead to the service department demanding time and effort from its customers, and the giving of nothing in return.
Computer Services are a classic example.
Why am I writing about this? Since while IS professionals ‘deal’ with time and change and paradoxes, we have no explicit tools for dealing with them. We can answer ‘what-if?’ questions. However what questions should be ‘what-if?’-ed? How do we deal with the above issues? If you have any ideas, send them in – as a learned paper, an opinion piece or a letter. Then I can find out how to restructure my faculty!