Change management

Draft

Definition

Change management refers to management methods to plan, control and implement programs of important changes.

Why changement management ?

• Most educational organizations are very conservative. An educational technologist not only has to worry about pedagogy and technology, but also about organizational issues.

Levels of intervention:

• Policy making (in particular regarding curricula issues, infrastructure services, etc.)
• The organization
• Organizational subunits and their dependencies
• External facilitators (e.g. teacher development organizations)
• Individuals (e.g. teachers).

Models

This chapter should contain a short overview on various change mangament related models, frameworks, etc. and point to other pages.

Change management procedure models

• Engeström's learning by expansion
• Bates managing technological change model

Organizational structure

• Structure is strategy (at least to a certain point). Therefore it is useful to understand how structure is related to function (and the other way round).

• See the Mintzberg taxonomy of organizational forms

Empowerment

• An important issue is how to empower teachers. In particular, to avoid a conflict between an official "empowerment" discourse and at the same time making life difficult for teachers who actually go for it ....

• See the Baruch empowerment model

Links

• Change management at elearning-reviews.org (excellent summaries)

• Organization Strategy on Google Answers. (Scroll down, excellent list).

• Fre M. Beshears' Executive summary of Tony Bates Managing Technological Change (retrieved 10:48, 26 May 2006 (MEST)).

References

• Bates, A.W. (Tony) (2000), Managing Technological Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders, San Franciso: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0-7879-4681-8.

Tony Bates' book is one of the most influential texts in today's change management for e-learning literature.

Further reading

(these are texts that need to be sorted out)

• Kevin Crowston (????), A Taxonomy Of Organizational Dependencies and Coordination Mechanisms, [1]

• Malone, Thomas, W. ,Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee and Brian Pentland, Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes. [2]