Page 193 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 11 ■ Strategies for change
■ 88 per cent of companies using benchmarking do so regularly;
■ 66 per cent of benchmark users started within the last five years.
The main areas regularly benchmarked were the following:

Human resources 60%
Customer service 72%
Manufacturing 68%
Information services 35%

Similarly the senior vice-president of a major teaching hospital in Chicago respon-
sible for total quality management regularly benchmarks on management costs,
treatment costs and quality/service.
At best, benchmarking allows us to assess the organization’s performance. This
becomes an integral part of the diagnostic phase of performance improvement
and change. Comparison with direct competitors (if feasible) and/or with the
‘best in the world’ in a particular field (e.g. distribution) is a worthwhile part of
this process. It promotes organizational learning. It can motivate people to
tougher yet realistic goals and it can provide early warning of competitive disad-
vantage. There are, therefore, many good reasons to include benchmarking in the
change process (see Watson, 1993).
While this may lead to the introduction of a number of organization-specific
changes (e.g. a new information system, a new product, a new factory, etc.) it may
also lead to the development of a more generic organization-wide change programme.
Examples of such programmes include business process re-engineering programmes,
total quality programmes, just-in-time manufacturing programmes, time-based strate-
gies for product development, empowerment (including ‘delayering’) strategies and
culture change programmes. These are particularly important because success in
implementation typically involves, and has impact throughout, the organization.
Changes to the corporate culture are necessary for each of them, which is why I
have separated culture change from the others in the ‘map’.
Finally it is worth noting that closure programmes and merger/integration pro-
grammes are major changes in their own right, as are the adoption of strategic
alliances and joint ventures. These are present problems of strategic change and

ones which I will touch on in this book but of which time and space do not allow
full treatment. However, I will suggest some additional reading. We refer to these
issues as generic multi-organizational change programmes because more than one
organization will be directly involved. This may be true for a generic organiza-
tion-wide change programme – for example, a consulting firm may be utilized, a
trade union may be involved – but in the multi-organizational case such involve-
ment is unlikely to have as important an influence on the outcomes as in the single-
organization case. Note, however, that a closure programme (clearly a
single-organization case) is on the borderline in that while a union may be
involved it may have little practical impact. However, closure programmes often
attract significant and often ‘political’ attention, regionally and even nationally,
with the consequence that other ‘organizations’ become involved (e.g. government
nationally or locally, other organizations seeking to purchase the activity due to be
closed, management buy-outs, etc.). For example, the closure of a naval base in

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