Article Review

In the competitive environment, companies within South Africa countries, especially from
public sectors, have increased importance in implementing information technology (IT)
change management as it delivers as a strategic. Preliminary research contained a form of
questionnaires on the conceptual framework that was identified as the data collection tool.
As a result, IT becomes a living being within the sectors as it shows a positive impact on the
IT adaptation thoroughly from the influence of people and organizational culture. The
adequacy of the progressions was estimated based on the level of accomplishment of IT
ventures given by the clients to the organizations. In comparison, it had been proven that
companies from public sectors were accepting the IT change management in terms of its
strategy, informative and individual possession as a good impression and a good start to
continue striving alongside IT development perspectives.

Living in a time when technological advancements are exponential, every company or public
sector must keep on track with the age of technology to compete vigorously in market
demand (Schmidt, Groeneveld, & Van De Walle, 2017). Furthermore, in every organization,
IT’s adaptation must be aligned to the business and be a part of it. That is why, IT
management’s integration must be taken seriously to achieve the organization’s desirable
effectiveness (Andrade, Albuquerque, & Teófilo, 2016). Changing IT management is a
method of supporting people and their organizations, changing from outdated approaches to
better approaches for doing undertakings to attain the necessary business outcome.
However, IT change management is not an easy task; it requires a collaboration between
technology, people and processes. Studies stated that IT changes direction as ensuring that
predictable approaches and techniques are utilized for viable and brief handling of the whole
change connected with the organization’s IT infrastructure and services (Mahalle, Yong, &
Tao, 2018). Indeed, IT change management has many successful stories besides its
effectiveness of cooperative progress to lessen disorderly impacts of systems
acknowledgment in the organizations. Implementation of IT change management leads to a
lesser risk, rising IT agility and improve service levels (Mohammed, 2018). In this case,
changing IT management must be done thoroughly based on its original infrastructure to
have a bigger vision whereby it can be measured through customer’s validation,
organization’s internal processes, structure and its resources. Regardless of its success,
potential failure may occur in changing IT management whereby it can easily cause
aggressive culture, political weights and unsatisfactory level of management obligation, etc
(Söderlund, 2004). Many potential failures can be categorized as the next nightmare for IT

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change management. Studies stated the usage of IT development in an organization
contributed to project misfortunes and delays and an absence of time management, which
eventually gave doubts to the clients concerning the project’s outcome (Rohmah & Subriadi,
2020). Another supported study from the statement whereby an unfamiliarized with the
changes is one of the dominant factors why there is difficulty in adapting with the changes
(Mogogole & Jokonya, 2018). Therefore, a fully diagnostic plan based on the conceptual
framework must be examined to analyze the failures that might happen in the future.

Based on the article, I agreed with selecting the conceptual framework that has the most
significant influence in dealing with IT change management. The first selection is
organizational factors whereby people’s involvement played a massive role in creating
change management success. This essential step involves encouraging employees to
acknowledge the change. The organization ought to offer essential support for them like
training for them to have a strong skillset because this approach is proven its effectiveness
in improving the success rate of IT change management (Van der Merwe & Bussin, 2006).
Besides organizational factors, culture was also predicted as the selected factor in IT change
management. This positive relationship showed that when an organization is elevated in
terms of people’s attitude and behavior, then the IT change management’s success rate will
improve tremendously. However, even though organizational factors and culture were the
selected ones based on the results stated, I strongly disagreed with the leadership factor
whereby it showed a weak relationship with IT change management and it was not voted as
one of the importance’s. This is because effective leadership is essential in managing and
improving change in an organization (Toor & Ofori, 2008). Certain studies even said that
leadership is the only method to sustain the business environment’s success rate (Holten,
Hancock, & Bøllingtoft, 2019). Since this step is more into involving people of higher
management and executives, their effective communication between employees is
constructive throughout the changing process. As we know that changing an organization’s
management is literally creating fear within employee’s perspectives however, the
implementation of effective leadership among their leaders will help them to overcome it and
creating no boundaries or gap to achieve a success rate of IT change management (Emere,
Aigbavboa, & Thwala, 2018). Thus, I believe that involvement between higher management
and the employees is crucial since they are working under the same organization and having
similar key performance indicators.

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This entire article elaborated on every factors precisely and according to the results taken.
The most emphatically compelling elements to IT change management were distinguished
as organizational culture and people, trailed by processes and structure as the partially
influencing factors and lastly, leadership. In my opinion, what is the most important intake
that can be useful for me is the elaboration of how important these factors are in managing
IT changes. This is because managing change is never easy and certain studies already
addressed that more than 70 % of failure rate happened within sectors in managing IT
changes (Sebastian, Allensworth, Wiedermann, Hochbein, & Cunningham, 2019). It shows
that this issue needs to be taken as seriously as managing other compartments. However,
on the other hand, the selected factors depended on the type of organization targeted, which
in this case was public sectors in South Africa. Therefore, the characteristics may contrast
from the past models referred above as different companies’ backgrounds lead to a different
factor in contributing success rate of IT change management. Besides that, the most
interesting part of this article is that somehow the differentiation between theoretical and
experimental results is sometimes not co-related with each other and excites me because
new findings and new assumptions were made to support the results. For example, the
leadership part whereby results showed a weak relationship on It change management. As
compared to management theory, leadership is one of the important factors that need to be
focused on (Toor, 2011). Regardless of the similarities, the discussions were explained
thoroughly with supporting details. In this article also, there are a few strengths and
weaknesses that can be highlighted. Focusing on the strengths, I believe that this article has
a high impact factor due to the selected location, which is South Africa. Generally, there is
not much exposure to investigating studies in South Africa because of its limitations. Since
this study was conducted on a small scale however, the findings were beneficial for the
readers. In addition, it showed that a future exploration can be done altogether depending on
a more extensive scope, larger sample size or using an alternate sampling method because
of its high impact factor. When it comes to weakness, since the study was focused only on
public sectors, therefore the results might not be significant as it does not conquer a whole
different organization. Overall, this study had given a comprehensive approach in tackling
the issue regarding IT change management among public sectors.

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Andrade, P. R. M. de, Albuquerque, A. B., & Teófilo, W. (2016). Change Management:
Implementation and Benefits of The Change Control in the Information Technology
Environment. International Journal of Advanced Information Technology, 6(1), 23–33.
https://doi.org/10.5121/ijait.2016.6102

Emere, C. E., Aigbavboa, C. O., & Thwala, W. D. (2018). An investigation of leadership

styles of construction professionals in the South African construction industry. 290–295.
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Holten, A. L., Hancock, G. R., & Bøllingtoft, A. (2019). Studying the importance of change
leadership and change management in layoffs, mergers, and closures. Management
Decision, 58(3), 393–409. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-03-2017-0278

Mahalle, A., Yong, J., & Tao, X. (2018). ITIL Processes to Control Operational Risk in Cloud
Architecture Infrastructure for Banking and Financial Services Industry. Proceedings -
2018 5th International Conference on Behavioral, Economic, and Socio-Cultural
Computing, BESC 2018, 197–200. https://doi.org/10.1109/BESC.2018.8697294

Mogogole, K. E., & Jokonya, O. (2018). A conceptual framework for implementing It change
management in public sectors. Procedia Computer Science, 138, 835–842.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.109

Mohammed, T. A. (2018). Critical Success Factors for Information Technology Infrastructure

Library Implementation in Public Service Organizations : An Exploratory Study.
International Journal of Advanced Information Technology, 8(1/2), 01–19.
https://doi.org/10.5121/ijait.2018.8201

Rohmah, M., & Subriadi, A. P. (2020). A Change Management Model for Information
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on Smart Technology and Applications: Empowering Industrial IoT by Implementing
Green Technology for Sustainable Development.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICoSTA48221.2020.1570613999

Schmidt, J. E. T., Groeneveld, S. M., & Van De Walle, S. (2017). A Change Management
Perspective on Public Sector Cutback Management: Towards a Framework for
Analysis.

Sebastian, J., Allensworth, E., Wiedermann, W., Hochbein, C., & Cunningham, M. (2019).
Principal Leadership and School Performance: An Examination of Instructional
Leadership and Organizational Management. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 18(4),

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 591–613. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2018.1513151

Söderlund, J. (2004). Building theories of project management: Past research, questions for
the future. International Journal of Project Management, 22(3), 183–191.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(03)00070-X

Toor, S. U. R. (2011). Differentiating leadership from management: An empirical

investigation of leaders and managers. Leadership and Management in Engineering,
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Toor, S. U. R., & Ofori, G. (2008). Leadership versus management: How they are different,
and why. Leadership and Management in Engineering, 8(2), 61–71.
https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)1532-6748(2008)8:2(61)

Van der Merwe, S., & Bussin, M. (2006). An Evaluation Of A Communication, Facilitation
And Project Management Tool To Enhance The Effectiveness Of Project Execution. SA
Journal of Human Resource Management, 4(3). https://doi.org/10.4102/sajhrm.v4i3.99