MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Technology and Innovation

A Framework for Managing IT-Enabled Change

By Robert I. Benjamin and Eliot Levinson

July 15, 1993

THE TRACK RECORD FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) IMPLEMENTATION IS NOT VERY GOOD. MIT’S MANAGEMENT IN THE 1990S program concluded that the benefits of IT are not being realized because investment is heavily biased toward technology and not toward managing changes in process and organizational structure and culture. The authors draw on general change management literature to develop a framework for managing IT-enabled change. They argue that IT-enabled change is somewhat different from change driven by other concerns. Nonetheless, a number of models from the change management literature can be quite useful. Their framework provides a common language for managers implementing IT-based change and shows how technology, business process, and organization must be adapted to each other for such change to be effective.

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At Vista Elementary School, classrooms look and operate differently from traditional classrooms. Each classroom has five computer terminals for students and a teacher workstation. Students spend fifteen minutes to an hour a day at the terminals, depending on need. They receive customized reading, math, and writing instruction, which is delivered over a computer network through a technology called Integrated Learning Systems (ILS). The system provides corrective feedback loops when students have difficulty with particular skills and collects data on each student’s progress. The rest of the time, students work individually or in small groups and, for a small part of the day, in the large group. Teachers spend much time coaching individual students, analyzing assessment results against expected outcomes, and prescribing new instructional sequences for students. The technology-mediated instructional system demands much more planning and assessment work on the teacher’s part than traditional teaching does. The teacher stands in front of the whole class only a small part of the time.

Across town, the Valley School also has an integrated learning system, but it is set up in a laboratory classroom managed by an aide. Students from all of the grades come twice weekly for basic skills instruction that is separate from their normal classroom activities, just as they go to music and art classes.

Vista is getting good results (productivity increases); Valley is not.To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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