Implementing IT Service Management as an Organizational Change: Identifying Factors Affecting the Change Resistance

摘要

When an IT organization decides to launch an IT service management programme, the discussion among employees after the decision is not always positive. New concepts, tools, roles and responsibilities and methods, as well as changes in strategy and culture may cause remarkable amount of change resistance among both employees and managers of a software company. Organizational change management is a fruitful research topic due to its challenging nature. It addresses employees' feelings, success factors of implementing strategic changes, role of change agents and factors affecting change resistance. In this study, we examine the IT service management programme as an organizational change and change resistance related to this change. Our research focuses on identifying symptoms of change resistance related to adoption of IT service management best practice framework IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The research problem of this study is: How does change resistance occur in IT service management programmes and how can it be decreased systematically? The main contribution of this paper is to present findings collected from five Finnish IT service provider organizations operating in different domains.