Change Management: A Game Changer for Effective Digital Transformation

Abstract

Change Management is a process of adopting appropriate guidelines on how to manage change and meet the set business objective. Change Management could be extended into the realm of providing leadership for a group of persons or organisation alongside the path of change and embed the needed framework in actualising the set business target. Conversely, Digital Transformation could be described as the deployment of technology in a business process to amplify business benefits realisation that include fast decision-making, efficient business processes and significant reduction in risk exposure through managing the operational risk foot print. Failures of many Digital Transformation initiatives around the world is traceable to poor framing or complete lack of change management process embedment in the implemented digital solution, this paper aims at proposing effective framework for embedding orchestrated change process. Several research works show that worldwide there are high rate of project failures in most digital oilfield implementations. The reasons for such high failure rate in the solution of Digital Transformation is poor or lack of experience in change management in such projects resulting in poor framing of the change process that will ultimately assist in orchestrating the disruptions that accompanies the implemented Digital Transformation in different assets. This research based project will be reviewing how effective change management process was implemented in a digital solution by an Oil and gas operator in a field offshore in sub-Saharan Africa. Elements such as proper engagement of the workforce, defined business processes, clear business objectives and experience of the change agents in managing previous projects will be evaluated because these are components that has been identified as key reasons for failure of the change management process implementation in most digital initiatives. What companies need to do is to be strategic with the approach of implementation of digital oilfields transformation to ensure that the disruption brought about by the digital oilfields solutions are orchestrated through effective change management embedment. The effective change management process, when applied, shows that orchestrated technology disruption process is embedded which will ultimately not just lead to benefit realisation of the solutions but will assure continuous business improvement process, overtime. The result of this study, has shown that effective change management processes are beneficial to the effective embedment of Digital Oilfields Transformation solutions. Outcome of this study could form a reference tool for similar robust digital oilfields transformation, elsewhere.