Mood's In Control
Barriers are defined as factors that prevent organizations from implementing, and/or factors that reduce the effectiveness of family-supportive benefits and policies after they are in place.
On our adopted organization, the barriers in their IS/IT implementation are the following:
Unemployment - While information technology may have streamlined the business process it has also crated job redundancies, downsizing and outsourcing. This means that a lot of lower and middle level jobs have been done away with causing more people to become unemployed.
Privacy - Though information technology may have made communication quicker, easier and more convenient, it has also bought along privacy issues. From cell phone signal interceptions to email hacking, people are now worried about their once private information becoming public knowledge.
Lack of job security - Industry experts believe that the internet has made job security a big issue as since technology keeps on changing with each day. This means that one has to be in a constant learning mode, if he or she wishes for their job to be secure.
Dominant culture - While information technology may have made the world a global village, it has also contributed to one culture dominating another weaker one. For example it is now argued that US influences how most young teenagers all over the world now act, dress and behave. Languages too have become overshadowed, with English becoming the primary mode of communication for business and everything else.
Barriers to strategy
Building on Porter's (1985) definition of strategy as, ' . . . the route to competitive advantage that will determine . . . performance', we can define an Information System Strategy as the analysis of the role that information systems can play in helping business units or companies to define a route to competitive strategy.
An information systems strategy brings together the business aims of the company, an understanding of the information needed to support those aims, and the implementation of computer systems to provide that information. It is a plan for the development of systems towards some future vision of the role of information systems in the organization.
Mintzberg (1987) suggests that strategy formation is a craft, rather than a science, and the process of crafting a strategy will involve negotiating various barriers. The barriers suggested in the literature include a number that affect any innovation, such as the hostile attitudes of management levels in a company, and the problem of recruiting appropriate staff. Some, such as the difficulty of measuring benefits, are more specific to IT implementation.
(The following data were from a study that had a survey of a big number of companies together with different financial services companies carried out to determine the extent to which the idea of 'information system strategies' was recognized in these organizations, how strategies, where they existed, were related to business aims, the elements of which strategies were composed, and the nature of barriers to design and implementation.)
Companies with a strategy were asked to identify the barriers either to setting up or implementing a strategy and to state whether the barrier had been major or minor. The results are shown in condensed form in Table 6. In Table 6, the ranking is based on the company citing a barrier as a major impediment. It is interesting, however, to look at the ranking that emerges when the change in proportions citing a barrier as a problem at set-up and implementation is used. This can be seen in Table 6, but is also set out in Table 7 for ease of reference.
| Rank | % response | |||
| Set-up | Impln. | Barrier | Set-up | Impln. |
| 1 | 3 | Measuring benefits | 30.5 | 32.6 |
| 2 | 2 | Nature of business | 27.7 | 34.8 |
| 3 | 1 | Difficulty in recruiting | 24.1 | 36.9 |
| 4 | 6 | Political conflicts | 23.4 | 19.9 |
| 5 | 5 | Existing IT investment | 22.0 | 24.8 |
| 6 | 4 | User-education resources | 17.0 | 29.1 |
| 7 | 11 | Doubts about benefits | 15.6 | 8.5 |
| 8 | 9 | Telecommunications issues | 10.6 | 11.3 |
| 9 | 7 | Middle management attitudes | 9.9 | 13.5 |
| 10 | 8 | Senior management attitudes | 9.2 | 9.2 |
| 11 | 10 | Technology lagging behind needs | 6.4 | 9.2 |
Table 6. Rank importance of barriers to strategy
Some of the changes shown in the table might be called logical shifts: for example, one might expect greater difficulty in recruitment when an organization actually needs to recruit, at the implementation stage; one might expect the lack of resources for user education to become more apparent when user education for the new systems needs to take place; and it is not surprising that technology lag makes itself felt after the initial optimism of the planning stage.
| Rank | Barrier | % change |
| 1 | Difficulty in recruiting | +12.8 |
| 2 | User-education resources | +12.1 |
| 3* | Nature of business | +7.1 |
| 3* | Doubts about benefits | -7.1 |
| 5 | Middle management attitudes | +3.7 |
| 6 | Political conflicts | -3.5 |
| 7* | Existing IT investment | +2.8 |
| 7* | Technology lagging behind needs | +2.8 |
| 9 | Measuring benefits | +2.1 |
| 10 | Telecommunications problems | +0.7 |
| 11 | Senior management attitudes | 0.0 |
| * = Ties. | ||
Table 7. Change in significance of barriers from set-up to implementation
Logical explanations for some of the changes are more difficult to find, however: the nature of the business (degree of diversification, rapidity of growth, etc.) is perceived as a major barrier initially and by an even greater proportion during implementation - what is the explanation for this? Perhaps it is that anticipated problems in this area actually materialize. Also, the attitudes of middle management assume a greater significance at implementation - this may be related to the lack of resources for user education and to the perception that technology lags behind needs, i.e., is failing to deliver anticipated benefits. Perhaps the smaller increase for senior management attitudes is related to the marked decline in the significance of political conflicts. The downward shift in political conflict may also be associated with the decline in doubts about benefits, although the difficulty of measuring benefits remains a problem.
When we examine the extent to which these factors are perceived to be either major or minor barriers, the picture shown in Table 8 emerges.
| % response | Rank | |||
| Set-up | Impln | Set-up | Impln | Barrier |
| 42.5 | 45.4 | 10 | 10 | Senior management attitudes |
| 53.9 | 52.5 | 6 | 6 | Middle management attitudes |
| 61.7 | 75.2 | 3 | 1 | Recruitment |
| 51.8 | 48.2 | 7 | 8* | Doubts about benefits |
| 63.8 | 63.8 | 2 | 4 | Measurement of benefits |
| 49.0 | 49.6 | 9 | 7 | Existing IT investment |
| 59.5 | 72.4 | 4 | 2 | User-education resources |
| 58.2 | 59.6 | 5 | 5 | Political conflicts |
| 66.7 | 67.4 | 1 | 3 | Nature of the business |
| 49.6 | 48.2 | 8 | 8* | Telecommunications issues |
| 39.7 | 41.8 | 11 | 11 | Technology lagging behind needs |
Table 8. Significance of barriers as either major or minor
From these various rankings, the difficulties in recruiting appropriate staff, the lack of resources to engage in user education, the nature of the business, and the difficulties of measuring benefits, emerge as the key features of IT strategies that are likely to cause problems for companies.
Further details of barriers and problems surfaced in the interviews. Even companies with a strong commitment were not immune to blind spots. For example, one interviewee said that:
...while there is this very strong belief in information technology, the top management have not believed in end-user computing... The main drive... is coming from DP because we see opportunities for managers, professionals, to help themselves. But it is not something for which there is a strong demand, and it is something which top management has treated as, you know, 'Why do you want to play with that, why don't you get on with your real job?'
The same person highlighted another inhibiting factor:
...another aspect of corporate style - the attitude to cost. The organization will quite happily invest millions almost at the drop of a hat in large-scale technology for big operational systems. I can get authority to spend a million or two on new hardware to improve the system in a ten-minute meeting with the managing director. And yet the same man will say, 'I might find a PC on the desk quite useful, but how much does it cost? [and then] 'It's not worth spending £2500 for a piece of junk on my desk.'
An interesting aspect of the recruitment problem was revealed in a financial services company which had a tradition of project teams directed by a senior manager from the user group and staffed mainly by users:
When we started all this there was quite a large army of part-qualified, or recently qualified, very bright, young actuaries, accountants, and so on, that we could pull on. An unfortunate effect of the systems we developed was that we reduced the need for the office to have a lot of those people - you didn't need lots of actuarial trainees with calculators doing these things any more. What we didn't see at the time was that we were cutting our own throats.
Now, over the last three or four years, that's been recognized in the office. Not just for computing reasons, but for all sorts of other reasons, it's starting to build up its professional input, its graduate trainees, again.
References:
http://www.smallbusinessbible.org/advan_disadvan_informationtechnology.html
http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/papers/1989ISstrat.html
