In every move, in every implementation barriers are unavoidable. Sometimes it is for the improvement of the performance but most of the time it’s a hindrance in implementing something. Organizations are as alike and unique as human beings. Similarly, group processes can be as straightforward or as complex as the individuals who make up the organization. It is vital to successfully launching a new program that the leaders understand the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of the organization or system in which they operate. Try to anticipate barriers to implementation so that you can develop strategies to minimize their impact or avoid them altogether.
The following list of common barriers can be used to help your leadership team identify potential obstacles. The list of essential elements for change can help the team brainstorm possible solutions. The lists are a good starting point for a planning session that will be most effective if it also takes into account the organizations unique.
In our adapted company, the technical department head point out few of the barriers that they encountered on IT implementation, one of them is the resistance of their employees. This resistance of employees is due to lack of knowledge and ability to adapt to changes, that’s why they are having a difficulty on implementing a new system or to change their system.
Common Barriers:
-Studying the problem too long without acting
-Trying to get everyone's agreement first
-Educating without changing structures or expectations
-Tackling everything at once
-Measuring nothing or everything
-Failing to build support for replication
-Assuming that the status quo is OK
-More Barriers to Change
-Lack of such resources as time and commitment
-Resistance to change
-Lack of senior leadership support or physician champion
-Lack of cooperation from other agencies, providers, departments, and facilities
-Ineffective teams
-Burdensome data collection
-Essential Elements for Change Effort
-Define the problem
-Define the target population
-Define effective treatment strategies and establish procedural guidelines
-Establish performance measures; set goals
-Define effective system changes and interventions
-Develop leadership and system change strategy
A barrier is an obstacle which prevents a given policy instrument being implemented, or limits the way in which it can be implemented. In the extreme, such barriers may lead to certain policy instruments being overlooked, and the resulting strategies being much less effective. For example, demand management measures are likely to be important in larger cities as ways of controlling the growth of congestion and improving the environment. But at the same time they are often unpopular, and cities may be tempted to reject them simply because they will be unpopular. If that decision leads in turn to greater congestion and a worse environment, the strategy will be less successful. The emphasis should therefore be on how to overcome these barriers, rather than simply how to avoid them. ECOCITY provides a useful illustration of the ways in which such barriers arise, and of how obstacles have been overcome, in case study cities.
Many information systems projects take considerably longer than originally planned. State-local projects, with their added layers of legal and organizational complexity are especially vulnerable to this problem. Since so many different organizations are affected by them, time delays lead to serious difficulties in planning for and adjusting to changes in operations.
Existing state-local systems suffer from the lack of a ubiquitous, consistent computing and communications infrastructure. This makes it difficult or impossible to operate technology supported programs in a consistent way from place to place and organization to organization. It also slows and complicates communication among state and local staff involved in joint programs. New York State is currently embarking on a statewide networking strategy called the NYT that will help solve this problem for future systems.
What are the principal barriers?
In our work in PROSPECTS, we grouped barriers into the four categories listed below. More recent work in TIPP has demonstrated that failure to adopt a logical approach to the process of strategy development can also impose a barrier to effective planning. This Guidebook is designed to help cities avoid this happening. TIPP also provides a set of recommendations.
1) Legal and institutional barriers
These include lack of legal powers to implement a particular instrument, and legal responsibilities which are split between agencies, limiting the ability of the city authority to implement the affected instrument. The survey of European cities in PROSPECTS indicates that land-use, road building and pricing are the policy areas most commonly subject to legal and institutional constraints. Information measures are substantially less constrained than other measures.
2) Financial barriers
These include budget restrictions limiting the overall expenditure on the strategy, financial restrictions on specific instruments, and limitations on the flexibility with which revenues can be used to finance the full range of instruments. PROSPECTS found that road building and public transport infrastructure are the two policy areas which are most commonly subject to financial constraints, with 80% of European cities stating that finance was a major barrier. Information provision is the least affected.
3) Political and cultural barriers
These involve lack of political or public acceptance of an instrument, restrictions imposed by pressure groups, and cultural attributes, such as attitudes to enforcement, which influence the effectiveness of instruments. The surveys in PROSPECTS show that road building and pricing are the two policy areas which are most commonly subject to constraints on political acceptability. Public transport operations and information provision are generally the least affected by acceptability constraints.
4) Practical and technological barriers
While cities view legal, financial and political barriers as the most serious which they face in implementing land use and transport policy instruments, there may also be practical limitations. For land use and infrastructure these may well include land acquisition. For management and pricing, enforcement and administration are key issues. For infrastructure, management and information systems, engineering design and availability of technology may limit progress.
Generally, lack of key skills and expertise can be a significant barrier to progress, and is aggravated by the rapid changes in the types of policy being considered.
How should we deal with barriers in the short term?
It is important not to reject a particular policy instrument simply because there are barriers to its introduction. One of the key elements in a successful strategy is the use of groups of policy instrument which help overcome these barriers. This is most easily done with the financial and political and cultural barriers, where one policy instrument can generate revenue to help finance another (as, for example, fares policy and service improvements), or one can make another more publicly acceptable (for example rail investment making road pricing more popular). These principles are discussed more fully in. A second important element is effective participation, as outlined in ,which can help reduce the severity of institutional and political barriers, and encourage joint action to overcome them. Finally, effective approaches to implementation can reduce the severity of many barriers, as discussed in.
How can we overcome barriers in the longer term?
It is often harder to overcome legal, institutional and technological barriers in the short term. There is also the danger that some institutional and political barriers may get worse over time. However, strategies should ideally be developed for implementation over a 15-20 year timescale. Many of these barriers will not still apply twenty years hence, and action can be taken to remove others. For example, if new legislation would enable more effective instruments such as pricing to be implemented, it can be provided. If split responsibilities make achieving consensus impossible, new structures can be put in place. If finance for investment in new infrastructure is justified, the financial rules can be adjusted. TIPP makes a number of recommendations for longer term institutional change. Barriers should thus be treated as challenges to be overcome, not simply impediments to progress. A key element in a long term strategy should be the identification of ways of resolving these longer term barriers.
The need for the improved implementation of information technology (IT) has been identified in both empirical and highly structured research studies as being critical to effective innovation and development at an industry and enterprise level. This need is greater in the construction industry as it has been relatively slow to embrace the full potential of IT-based technologies.
Beany & Gordon (1988) researched the barriers that exist to successful introduction of IT systems (in this case CAD/CAM) and reported that they fall into three categories, structural, human and technical. Structural barriers are those factors inherent in the organisations structure or systems that are not compatible with the new technology.This can include communication, authority flows and planning systems, and reflect how the organisation has traditionally done things. A failure to perceive the strategic benefits of the investment, a lack of co-ordination and co-operation due to organisational fragmentation, and a perception of high risk are all symptoms of organisational problems. Human barriers include psychological problems that arise in most periods of change, such as uncertainty avoidance, and resistance to loss of power or status. Technical barriers, they noted, were factors in the technology itself, such as lack of system compatibility.
Functional barriers relate to information and work flows and include identification of strategic information needs. Technical factors relate to the need for flexibility and information handling capacity, with the dangers of disjointed islands of automation being created which limit information flow. Human factors are the need for job redefinition and the resistance to change which lead to a lack of company wide flexibility or commitment. Other authors have confirmed that the key barriers to IT implementation tend to be organisational, rather than technical, and that these barriers are often understated. Galliers, for instance, focused on general management problems in successful planning of strategic information systems and concluded that key factors were the attitude, commitment and involvement of management: the current sophistication of IS within the company: the ability to measure and justify the benefits of strategic IS: and the justify the benefits of strategic IS: and the integration of IS into business strategy. While the perception of the importance of these barriers is likely to change over time.
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