Question 1
In many countries, IT organizations are evolving from the roles of order-takers to those of business enablers (Fahey & Randall, 2001). Fahey & Randall further demonstrate that to accomplish this, companies are forced to transform the function of demand management. Traditionally, demand management involved waiting for handoffs from project in those units within the company were deemed capable of improving operations. Though valuable, such ideas are rarely aligned with company's needs to ensure they are smoothly developed and adopted throughout the organization. At Toyota Motor Sales, by contrast, IT systems have been moving toward the "next-generation", a new approach of managing demand for purposes of meeting overall corporate goals rather than the narrower demands of independent projects. This approach has been instrumental in eliminating redundancy, as well as molding the demands of the organization. The system ensures that all IT positions are producing and managing projects that engender business value. The approach has seen the development of new tools and metrics to measure performance, with clear benchmarks. This helps in determining whether an IT project has met its expectations, as well as puts in place controls to minimize schedule variances and cost (Rapp, 2002).
Question 2
According to Balogun & Hailey (2004), the change model is a comprehensive framework that deals will all factors necessary in analyzing a change program (Balogun & Hailey, 2004). The outer ring of the model contains features that can either constrain or enable change, whilst the inner ring contains options of implementing change that are at the disposal of change agents (Balogun, Hailey & Viardot, 2006). The strength of the model is in its appreciation of the intricacies that surround organizational change and the need to be context sensitive when it comes to change designs. The fact that the model is context sensitive implies that it can be applied to numerous contexts than originally intended by the author. It is a key mechanism for handling planned changes, especially when such changes are transitional in nature, such as the aforementioned Toyota case (Balogun, Hailey & Viardot, 2006).
