Integrating business change: A strategic role for informatics professionals

The pace of business change has long been perceived as accelerating continuously, and even as having become unsustainable. Informatics is by turn a driver, an enabler, and sometimes a constraint of change. Informatics professionals need to be equipped to govern and lead not just IS/IT change but wider business change. In 2009 BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT in the UK, formed a Business Change Specialist Group, bringing together informatics and change management researchers and professionals. BCS has also commissioned research into the role of informatics professionals in initiating, prioritizing and leading business change. Businesses typically lack structures to manage change holistically across the enterprise. Informatics professionals tend to have a broad view across the organization, giving then a more holistic perspective on change than many of their colleagues. They have a wider role to play, centre-stage, not only in initiating and leading informatics change, but in integrating multiple concurrent change initiatives.