Meeting the Challenge of Technology‐driven Change Within an Institutional Context: The Greek Case

Abstract

Propelled by the driving forces of globalization and technology explosion, public institutions face the challenge of rapid and discontinuous change. Such change has come to undermine the relevance of traditional approaches on how an institution should be managed. We analyse a technologydriven change effort, the implementation of an Integrated Information System (IIS), that unfolds within the boundaries of the institutional context of the Hellenic Parliament. The purpose of our research, which reports on a qualitative fi eld study, is to explore and understand how the particularities of technology-driven change on the one hand, and institutional change on the other, can be integrated, paying particular attention to how the different actors involved in the process interact and affect the unfolding of such a change effort. Our fi ndings show that strong friction did indeed occur between old and new institutional factors, but that the key factor enabling the change effort to advance and fi nally gain legitimation was the encouragement and support in the institutional change process of opportunity-based and emerging changes, as proposed by the technological change literature. organizations has led scholars to extract management practices from the business literature and try to apply them to public organizations. The ' New Public Management ' (NPM) school of thought has broadly infl uenced public management reforms and introduced new managerial practices that put more emphasis on the market and on replacing the bureaucratic structures of public organizations with more fl exible ones as found in the private sector ( PUMA/HRM 2001 ). In general, this movement could be seen as a transformation from public bureaucracy to a model of more fl exible administration ( Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004 ).In this environmental context, our research set out to address the challenge of change in public organizations through an exploration of the unfolding of a planned technologydriven change effort in the shape of the implementation of an Integrated Information System (IIS) in the Hellenic Parliament. The implementation of the IIS took place within the framework of a larger change programme in the Greek public sector, inspired by New Public Management principles and which presented an immense challenge both at the institutional and political levels of Greek public administration ( Philippidou et al. 2004 ). The IIS change effort provides a representative case for analysing how and why change unfolds the way it does in a particular public institutional context (that of the Hellenic Parliament) throwing light on the link between change management and institutional change, analysing, in particular, the involvement and interaction of different key actors in the process.In the section that follows we briefl y review key literature on technology-driven change and change in an institutional context. We then describe the research setting and methodology. Findings from the fi eldwork depicting and analysing the change process within the institutio...

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