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About
the Course
IT being the major driver of change today, the objective of the course is to make top managers of all functions capable to deal with this change and come out successful. Managers often fear that their lack of knowledge on computers can affect their careers. This seminar helps to dispel their fears and shows that managers need not know technology to be good tech savvy managers. Instead they need to know some simple facts about the technology, its capabilities and about the psychology of change. These concepts are presented in an easy to grasp non technical language.
The seminar enumerates the qualities required for CEOs to be good technology leaders. CEOs and heads of departments play a very crucial role in the implementations of ERPs. ERPs can also fail because of ineffective leadership of the CEOs. Unfortunately most of the technology forums dwell on technology, but the people and change management issues are what the top managers should really know to be effective managers. The seminar also explodes the myths about this technology. It is an eye opener to know that this technology which we rave about actually has serious pitfalls. To be effective, managers need to know these pitfalls and understand the rules of the game to be able to avoid the pitfalls and use technology to their advantage. Unfortunately the rules of the game are not known and companies incur heavy losses on account of failed implementation projects. The seminar gives useful insights on how to play by the rules of the game and come out winner.
1. Make all managers ready for the new age by being more IT Aware and succeed in their chosen career by being more adept in utilizing technology to their advantage.
2. Equip the Managers with skills to survive, succeed and grow in a dynamic environment of IT-Driven Change.
3. Overcome fear of technology, or the sense of inaptitude
4. Help all managers have a less stressful career through better insights into IT to cope with the dynamics of IT Driven Change.
5. (For HR Managers) Make the managers ready to tread off the beaten path and take on a new HR role which can add to their effectiveness in companies.
Prem has very closely interacted with people and lived with them during the struggle of technological changes. He therefore knows their fears, discomforts, anxieties and frustrations particularly with respect to IT driven organizational change. Their fears over lack of IT knowledge are genuine, but there is a gap in what managers think they need to know of IT, and what they should actually know. Prem has compiled over the last decades just that what the managers should know about IT to be effective, and presents it in a language simple for them to grasp.
What makes this presentation unique compared to most of the IT seminars is his 'out-of-the-box' thinking and a knack to see what is not so obvious. He has done a deep analysis of the psychology of change from the industrial revolution to the information revolution.
For Whom?
Participants can be CEOs, Entrepreneurs, CXOs, Business heads, Department Heads, Line Managers, etc. In other words, managerial staff cutting across all functions.
Whereas the program is useful for managers from all functions like Finance, Production, Materials, Procurement, HR, Admin, etc., it is equally useful for IT managers like CIOs, Sr. Mangers, Project Managers, Analysts, implementers, program managers and Trainers.
Levels/Profiles of Participants
Participants can be CEOs, CXOs, HODs, Line Managers, Team Managers, etc. In other words, any managerial staff at any level.
Functional Background of Participants
Participants can cut across all functions. Whereas the program is particularly useful for non-IT managers from all functions like Finance, production, materials, Procurement, HR, Admin, etc., it is equally useful for IT managers like CIOs, Sr. Mangers, Project Managers, Analysts, implementers, program managers and team leaders.
Type of Participating Companies
Any company going through or planning to automate their business processes using ERP, in-house software or any software. Whereas it is particularly useful for companies which are at an early stage of implementation or those who are planning to implement it in the near future, it will be useful also for those who have already implemented applications.
Group Composition
Group composition can be either all CEOs, or a mix of Managers cutting across levels with participants from multiple companies. It can be done for all senior managers of a single company too which can lead to healthy discussions on its hot issues. It can be designed for homogenous or heterogeneous groups.
It is targeted for the non IT senior functional managers, though IT managers will also benefit from it.
Why Should I Attend?
No Manager can say that he/she has nothing to do with IT. No department can do without using computers. Of course, people do use laptops and tabs for wordprocessing, emails and chats. But that is just one simple use and that is not what is important for this seminar. Most departments need to use applications to automate their business processes. If they do, and use them effectively, they can be assured of less stress, more efficiency and growth. They can think of going home early and spend less stressful time with their family. If they are not using computers, most likely it is because they did not know how to use it, or they tried but found it too complicated a task to implement.
Even if you do use IT department services, for that too, you need to do most of the work. You need to define what you want and finally when the solution is there, your department people have to deliver the goods by using it religiously, honestly and sincerely. You as a manager have to drive your team to use it with discipline, else it will never work
So you have no escape from IT. IT is omnipresent and every manager has to deal with IT. In fact if you want IT to work for you, it is you who are the major role player and not IT. You play a very critical role. Do you want to just leave it to IT and then keep blaming IT for failure or do you want to take the reins in your hand and drive the change? After all it is a question of your efficiency and your growth. You after all more than technology, it is the people who make or break IT implementations, and you need to become an expert of managing people under change.
Benefits for Functional Managers
This training benefits managers personally – both in terms of their success in the company and their personal growth as professionals. Managers with IT awareness are in greater demand in the corporate world. There is already a great digital divide, Managers who are IT Aware and those who are not. The seminar will help them to be on the right side of the divide.
Managers will be able to better utilize technology without the frustrations and pains, which most managers go through. They will be able to interact with the IT folks more intelligently and thereby use technology more effectively to their own advantage.
Managers will learn not only to manage IT-Driven change, but to be a catalyst to change.
If you are with ERP implementation group, you can cut the time, cost and stress of ERP implementation. You can help your client contribute more meaningfully to the success of the project. If you are in the Software Development group, you will learn how to design software which works with people and what are the people related issues which cause failures.
If you are doing software support, this will help you in your interactions with the customers. You will understand your customers better and also make them understand and appreciate your point of view better.
This Seminar is a boon to the CIO and in-house IT Professionals. It aims to develop more IT-Aware Managers who can contribute to more effective and smoother change. This seminar covers just that what is required for top managers to be intelligent, constructive and understanding partner in the IT game.
The IT professional can attend this seminar along with the functional managers, or ask for this seminar to be conducted in-house for their managers.
This seminar recognizes that you as a CIO have a tough job cut out for you. You are dealing with a customer who has no time for you, but has all the bright ideas to suggest changes after the software has been delivered. Your CEO thinks that IT is to be blamed for every small problem that arises. Everyone in the company thinks that your IT folks are too finicky, too sensitive, too possessive and totally closed to new ideas. Expectations are sky high, but cooperation almost nil. And if IT fails, there is no one else to blame but you and your IT department. This seminar aims to change all this. It aims to change the way managers look at IT and the IT folks.
The seminar ensures better participation by managers by working on their subconscious fear of technology. It delivers just that what managers need to know not only to face IT Driven change but to be catalysts to change. The good news is that the managers need not know technology, they need to know people’s perception of this technology, their behaviour under technological change and how to manage resistance to change.
This seminar also helps managers to set the right expectations from this technology. It addresses the common misconceptions, mindset and psychological issues. It is an eye opener for the managers to know that this technology, which we rave about and consider to be far superior to machines of machine-age, is in fact far inferior and far more demanding. This helps set right expectations and also to empathise with the IT professionals. It helps bring the two teams closer to form a solid team to face the perils of this difficult technology.
Benefits for CIOs and In-house IT Professionals
• They will learn how to get their users and functional managers to collaborate with IT rather than confront
• They will learn how to have their users empathize with IT folks
• IT can help CEOs to take a more balanced view and be more effective change managers thereby helping IT projects
• Your chances of success and growth are enhanced as you can have your users, CEOs collaborate with you to make your projects successful
• You will understand your customers better and also make them understand and appreciate your point of view better.
• Managers will learn not only to manage IT-Driven change, but to be a catalyst to change.
• With higher involvement and support from your functional managers and CEO, your solutions will be more effective and IT projects more likely to succeed
• The transition to your automated systems will be less stressful.
Few will dispute the fact that the biggest driver of change in businesses today is information technology. And change impacts people. No one likes change – people naturally and strongly resist change. But since change is permanent, it creates stress and impacts people behaviour. People’s attitude is the greatest hindrance to change.
IT, unlike popular belief, is not all technology. It has a very high people component. A successful IT implementer has to be a people expert as much as a technology expert.
There is a big paradox in businesses today. When IT impacts so many employees and their behaviour, and businesses have HR departments to look after everything concerning employees, why is it that no one has thought of a role for HR in IT implementations? HR itself has been blind to this possibility.
Globally, HR has not yet recognized an opportunity that information revolution has given to it on a platter. There is a new role that HR can play in this business world which is changing so rapidly on account of IT. HR has to rediscover itself.
IT driven change is impacting people. People are not comfortable with rapid change and need support to cope with this change. Who else in the company can understand people psychology? Who can understand the psychology of change? Finance? IT? Production? Obviously it is HR.
IT guys are the guys who drive this change. They affect the lives and lifestyle (in companies) of all the people. Any change can be driven only by person who has authority. Can you imagine a lowly peon trying to bring about a change in behaviour, and a CEO trying to do it? It is a no-brainer to say that CEO can best drive a change. It is obvious that a person who wields the authority is best suited to bring about a change in companies.
Here is another paradox – businesses are full of paradoxes. IT needs to drive the change but has no authority. The affected parties resist change and IT can do nothing about it. IT folks’ lives depend on the success of projects or change implementations. But they cannot drive change or they do not have the authority to push it through. The affected parties have nothing to lose. They can blame it on IT (although they do not know how much they loose in terms of efficiency). But they can certainly save their skin and avoid the discomfort of change. There is always a conscious desire to improve efficiencies, but there are also these lurking subconscious desires to save their skin and to avoid change. Subconscious desires always overpower conscious desires.
To make matters worse, technology is equally confusing to most managers. “I just don’t understand this technology” is a very common phrase heard in offices. The CEO, who IT department can look upon to assist in bringing about a change, is equally confused. Whereas he is comfortable speaking to and befriending the HR manager, Finance manager, production manager, etc., he keeps the IT manager at arms length as he does not understand anything of IT. He is not comfortable talking to IT folks so he never befriends them. In such a situation, politics flourishes, as parties involved in automation try to take advantage of his ignorance. Since today’s CEO is more comfortable dealing with HR than with IT, HR has a great opportunity there to help the CEO cope with this issue of managing IT Driven change.
HR has a great role to play. But HR has to first equip itself to play this role. It needs to first understand the dynamics of this IT Driven Change. They need to understand what exactly creates this stress and confusion during IT Implementations. HR can then embrace this new role of change catalyst and contribute to the company’s growth.
IT folks can continue to be the change agents, and HR needs to take on this new role of a change catalyst.
Benefits for HR
What is the role that HR can play to support both the IT and the CEO? This seminar will uncover the opportunity waiting for you, an opportunity that HR has not tapped so far anywhere in the world. The seminar also equips you to successfully play this role. To execute this successfully, HR folks need to understand some very simple but little known facts about IT. Managing IT-Driven Change is a very specialized field. Unfortunately, you will not find these skills documented in any curriculum, nor in anything written so far. Managing IT Driven change should ideally be a part of each HR management course in all management schools. But paradoxically, no one has ever looked at IT as a field where HR can contribute.
Luckily, this special skill has nothing to do with technology, it deals more with mindset and psychological issues – a topic again which HR is best equipped to understand and handle.
There is a big need for this role to be taken up looking at the amount of failures in IT implementations. A study puts IT Implementations failure to anything between 70-80 % accompanied with heavy loss of hard cash. As if this is not good enough reason for the new role, there is the employee stress, friction, politics and the immense loss of employee efficiency due to this stress.
It is a proven fact that Companies which succeed today are companies that have the agility to change.
Here are two simple questions: First, what is the greatest driver of change today? No prizes for guessing, it is Information Technology. Second, what is the biggest hindrance to change? No prizes for guessing again – it’s people, more significantly, people's attitude.
It is a no-brainer therefore to conclude that agility depends on people and their attitude to change. CEOs, therefore, need to make special efforts to change people's attitude towards IT and IT-Driven Change if you want to create a successful agile organization.
So far your emphasis on training has been very lop-sided – while you know the need for honing the technical skills of the IT people, have you ever thought of building your own skills to handle IT driven change and its impact on people? Have you ever thought that your leadership team (which is the other strong partner in the IT game) too needs to enhance its skills to be able to imbibe and handle the change brought about by IT?
While IT drives the change, people naturally and strongly resist change. Change is unsettling. The problem is compounded by peoples’s fear of technology. Most managers are not comfortable with IT. “I just don’t understand this technology” is a very common phrase heard in offices.
If people’s fear of IT and their attitude towards IT is the deterrent for agility and change, there is every reason to focus on efforts to overcome this fear of IT, reduce the stress of people by comforting them and addressing the attitude issue.
The CEO is most suited to drive change in an organization and create an agile organization. Driving any change needs authority, and a CEO is the person who wields that authority on each and every person in the organization. Paradoxically, IT department, who are the drivers of change, have no authority over any of those who have to imbibe the change if IT has to be successful.
In such a situation, the IT department looks upon the CEOs to assist in bringing about a change and wielding the authority which can make their lives simpler. But the CEOs have been avoiding it and at best delegating IT to more junior officers - they wish they too knew about IT.
The CEO has a role cut out in this path towards driving change and agility. But the CEOs have been avoiding it because of want of the right skills, and to some extent their own fear of technology. There is good news. There is no need to know technology to be a good CEO. But at the same time there are some other very simple things to know, which unfortunately are not taught in any schools nor are being talked about in any forums. This seminar aims to change all this. It aims to change the way managers look at IT and the IT folks.
This seminar steers clear of any heavy technology. It covers some very simple ideas which every CEO must know in order to be a good IT-Change Manager, and thus open the doors to a more agile business. There are some simple things about this technology that you need to learn and a lot of it that you need to unlearn. You need to understand how people behave under IT Driven change and what are their common misconceptions. It is more of a mindset issue which needs to be corrected. But it cannot be taken lightly because mindset issues are the most difficult to change. Prem Kamble, through his close observations and analysis has discovered that we managers still operate with an industrial age mindset and need to change to a information age perspective. The seminar uses a unique method called the “Time Swing Analysis” Method to analyse industrial age psychology and identify the mindset change required to be a successful manager of the information age.
Young Managers today run a greater risk of technology failure. This may sound contrary to common belief. The laptop and smart phone wielding young managers may tend to overestimate their IT prowess. This course opens their eyes to one simple fact – use of laptops, gadgets and internet can make them IT literate, but not IT Aware, which is a soft skill required to succeed in today’s IT-Driven world.
It is important for all managers today to be tech savvy. The key to success for business managers is how effectively they use technology for improving efficiency, cutting cost and providing innovative services to both internal and external customers. Moreover, few will dispute the fact that the biggest driver of change in businesses today is information technology. Rapid IT-driven change is impacting people. No one likes change. People naturally and strongly resist change. But since change is permanent, it creates stress and impacts people behaviour. Budding managers need the skills to manage IT-Driven change.
Today there is a big divide between managers who know IT and those who do not. At the same time there is little awareness as to what makes a manager IT Savvy. The younger generation is more prone to fall into a trap of believing that they are IT savvy since they are proficient in using laptops, using internet and the technology gadgets. But being extremely proficient with using latest gadgets and using laptops for PowerPoint presentations and MS Word is certainly not what it takes to be an IT savvy manager. There is a lot more for a manager to know - not only about the technology, but also know how to pull the right strings to successfully manage technology within his or her department. The manager needs to successfully manage the people and their behaviour under the change created by IT. It is the manager who has all the right and wrong strings in the hands. You do not need to go far to hear stories of IT failures. It is not the IT department alone which plays a role in the success or failure of IT. When you as a manager in any function try to automate operations in your department, you will be the key to success or failure. And success of automation can mean your success.
Information Technology is all pervasive in businesses today. IT is the primary driver of change, and change is always unsettling. Today the corporate world is going through the turmoil of the Information age, just as the world went through the turmoil of the Industrial revolution. This means that managers who enter the corporate world need to be equipped to manage in a unique environment of turmoil and change not experienced before in history.
Young managers tend to ignore this – “Oh, this is a story for the old grey haired managers who are uncomfortable with technology, not for us”. Paradoxically, young managers run a greater risk of failure. Because of their comfort with handling laptops, smart phones and the various electronic gadgets, young managers run a greater risk of overestimating their own IT prowess. Just being at ease with using laptops, smart phones and new-age gadgets does not equip you to manage people reeling under the impact of IT-Driven Change. There is something beyond technology which gives managers the maturity to deal with this unique unprecedented change environment. While the young managers may be IT Literate, what they need is IT Awareness.
This skill is required by all managers (irrespective of their functional specialization) to survive, succeed and grow in a dynamic environment of IT-Driven Change. This course helps all managers to acquire the required skills to help themselves to succeed. Managers who wish to pursue HR as a career can help themselves as well as carve out a new HR role of helping others to manage IT-Driven change (a role which HR all over the world has not recognized).
Most courses on Computing stress on technology. This course uncovers a new field of study called Behavioral IT, which is a term coined by Prem Kamble. It does a judicious balance between technology and management of technology. For it is not enough for managers to know about IT, it is in fact more important to know the psychology of change brought about by IT – cultural change, behavioural change, procedural change and change in relationships of people. In other words, it is not important to be “IT Literate”, it is more important to be “IT Aware”.
Whatever be their functional specialization, this course brings to the managers just what they need to know to become effective managers in their own chosen field. After all, no business or department can run without IT.
This course makes you aware of the technological, organizational, behavioural and psychological issues in technology, and thereby helps ensure your own success and growth in organizations.
Facebook implementation and ERP implementations in companies are two very different things. Whereas Facebook activity involves you alone performing some very simple processes, in companies we have multiple people performing complex interdependent processes involving teams. AUtomation of applications in companies is much more complex because of following reasons:
1. Facebook users are voluntary. There is no compulsion. Not only people join at their own free will, only people who are interested join and they too participate as and when they want, not compulsorily on a regular basis. In companies, those who have to use it have to use it compulsorily for all transactions -they have no choice not to use it. They have to use it for transacting business.
2. Use of Facebook does not involve a process and is not dependent on others. An individual does an atomic activity like posting a comment or uploading a photo, etc. which is an independent activity not dependent on any one else’s activities. Whereas in ERP, it is a team activity. Other people are affected by your accuracy and timeliness of usage. The processes are long and distributed over several people. When there are interdependent teams involved in implementation, there are more problems and challenges.
3. There is more need of managing change, regulating and guiding. There are more managerial and organizational issues in ERP implementation.
4. ERPs are not so user friendly systems like web based applications meant for masses. ERPs were not designed to be so user friendly as they were not designed for masses.
5. There is no fear of loss of job or loss of power in case of facebook, so there is no politics and inherent resistance.
Which Companies would Benefit?
It is for all managers working in all companies, whether manufacturing or service companies whoever are using software or trying to implement software.
It is ideal to kick off your project with this seminar which can be attended by all concerned – IT, User department managers and top management. It will help create a strong team and bonding between the stakeholders and the prime movers. It helps creating empathy in both IT and users. That is really the key to success of IT projects. It will help you reduce the time, cost and stress of ERP implementation or any IT project.
This will help in optimising the use of ERP and thus furthering company's growth. It will help in improving your ERP outputs by brining in a discipline. It will help develop a healthy collaboration between IT and the ERP users so that there can be a better dialog to understand processes and for further optimization of business processes. It will help you to grow by making better use of ERP and improving your quality of usage.
Miscellaneous Queries
“Behavioral IT” is a new word coined by Prem Kamble. You can click here to know more. It is a new age soft skill which helps all managers to be effectively use IT and succeed in an IT-Driven corporate world.
This skill is required by all managers, Department Heads and CEOs to survive, succeed and grow in a dynamic environment of IT-Driven Change. It helps all managers to make the best use of IT in their own departments and succeed.
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