Organizational Politics Shapes IT Decision

¶ … Organizational Politics Shapes IT Decision Making

Departments and divisions by nature compete with one another for financial resources, the best possible employees, recognition and the largest percentage of revenue as a result. Mintzberg (1991) states that when competition becomes dysfunctional, politics begin which can cripple an organizations' ability to perform even the simplest cross-functional and collaborative tasks. The same holds true in the context of organizations who for a wide spectrum of factors, are being pushed to adopt entirely new technologies to stay at parity with competitors in an increasingly hostile, turbulent world (Spicer, 2005). The mantra "change or die" is often heard by CEOs from everyone from McKinsey & Company consultants to their own sales forces that see first-hand how rapidly the world is changing, becoming more competitive in the process (Karacsony, 2006). The dichotomy is one of the external environment forcing change, sometimes violently and rapidly on a company, versus the tendency within a company to seek the status quo (Karacsony, 2006).

The Catalyst of Organizational Politics and its Effect on IT

The holding and judicious use of knowledge in any organization today is seen as an insurance policy of sorts against getting laid off or downsized. Despite this being a major illusion on the part of millions of people who have exceptionally valuable data that once shared could propel their companies to greater profitability; they hoard data as if it was a proxy of job importance and security. This hoarding of knowledge and data is the catalyst of dysfunctional politics and the beginnings of any organization beginning to lose its competitiveness in the market. Yet dissecting why this occurs and at its pace tends to correlate with the complexity, extent and magnitude of the change influencing a person's position, status, rank and perceived stability in an organization (Lui, Chan, 2008). The organizational politics then has at its root the insecurity of the workers who hoard information at the expense of their organizations moving forward to their objectives (Terrell, 1989).

Taken to an extreme organizational politics will strangle IT initiates out of fear of change instead of embracing their series of strategies as a means to get to strategic objectives faster. Left unchecked, organizational politics will relegate IT to being the "dial tone" of the organization and little else. That's because as the "dial tone" or the custodian of IT systems and basic functional areas of e-mail systems, firewalls and office automation, they are not a political theat. Add in customer data in the form of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiative that must integrate the much-coveted customer data from many different divisions of an organization, and any organization as the makings of a major political fight. The development of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that fundamentally re-order how companies manage their supply chains, logistics, pricing, manufacturing scheduling, services and financial reporting, and the propensity of organizations to rely on organizational politics to disrupt or render the ERP system implementation useless is high (Lui, Chan, 2008). Organizational politics then left unchecked will attempt to squelch, even force to fail any IT plan as seen as too much of a threat to the current hierarchy of status and power within any organization. This is often seen in fact from the standpoint of manufacturing companies who attempt to en masse move their existing production processes to an ERP system prior to streamlining the existing processes first. This tends to only automate mediocrity and speed up the inefficiencies the systems were acquired to overcome in the first place.

Overcoming Organizational Politics to Make Progress