An actor‐dependency technique for analyzing and modeling early‐phase requirements of organizational change management due to information systems adoption

Purpose – Because of the competitive economy, organizations today seek to rationalize, innovate and adapt to changing environments and circumstances as part of business process reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process reengineering program selected and the technique used to model it, BPR brings with it the issues of organizational and process changes, which involves managing organizational changes (also called “change management”). Change management is non‐trivial, as organizational changes are difficult to accomplish. Though some attempt has been made to model change management in enterprise information systems using conventional conceptual modeling techniques, they have just addressed “what” a change process is like, and they do not address “why” the process is the way it is. Design/methodology/approach – The approach presents an actor‐dependency‐based technique for analyzing and modeling early‐phase requirements of organizational change management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the entities and activities. Findings – A case study illustrates this approach. Originality/value – This approach is novel in the sense that there is no similar intentional modeling approach for change management to the best of our knowledge. The approach is expected to be valuable because using this approach one can reason about the opportunities and changes that are associated with BPR and can incorporate prominently the issues related to change in the process of system analysis and design.