Change Management of a Politically Sensitive Information System

Abstract

This paper describes the problems that are associated with change management of a politically sensitive information system. When an information system is the one that serves large population, any delays or poor quality in the service can be a politically sensitive issue which can bring about citizens’ uprising. Thus change management for replacing an old information system with a new one has to be extra careful when the information system is politically sensitive. This paper presents an incident caused due to poor change management during the implementation of the Information System that was supposed to be used in running the operations of Department of Motor Vehicle in the state of Nevada, USA. The Nevada DMV was in the process of moving from old-style mainframe-based computing environment to the state-of-art client-server architecture. However the new Nevada DMV information system after being put to work resulted in confusion and inconvenience to the citizenry of the state by creating problems such as 5-hour waiting time for driver’s license renewal. This paper posits that the failure of adopting the adequate change management policy was the root cause of the problem of Nevada DMV systems. This study analyzes the development and implementation stages of the system using only publicly available information such as newspaper reports as well as minutes of the meeting held by the city council. Especially the minutes of the city council meetings provide frank revelation on why and how the problem occurred due to the fact that all the relevant parties participated in the meetings. The analysis supports the proposition that the change management using the method called “direct cutover” was the wrong way to go for the implementation of an information system that is politically sensitive which is the case of the Nevada DMV information system.