NASCIO Releases White Paper and Research Summary on Government Transformation through Change Management

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) today announced the release of a new white paper Transforming Government through Change Management: The Role of the State CIO.

The white paper reviews contemporary ideas surrounding the subject of organizational transformation, presents a state perspective on the issue, and provides the state CIO with relevant recommendations and calls to action. The accompanying research summary provides a short overview of the research findings presented in the white paper.

"Continual change is the norm for both government and private industry," said South Carolina CIO Jim Bryant, PhD, co-chair of NASCIO's Enterprise Architecture Committee. "We've designed this white paper and research summary to be a resource for our state CIOs, and we are planning further work in this subject area, which leverages enterprise architecture discipline."

The paper illustrates that change is an ongoing process that requires organizations to become change competent. The paper emphasizes that as with enterprise architecture, the best approach to organizational change involves incremental, step-by-step transformation that is effectively delivered through valued relationships involving all stakeholders.

"CIOs must see themselves as change agents," said Utah CIO Stephen Fletcher, co-chair of NASCIO's Enterprise Architecture Committee. "As CIOs develop their management plans and strategies for implementing those plans, they must also have a strategy for moving their organizations toward that new vision. It is no surprise that the most significant challenges and enablers to organizational transformation are not technological, but rather relational. One of the strongest points made in the paper is that organizations don't change -- it is people within organizations that change."