Analyzing the change of US Federal Communications Commission Assignment 2022

Assignment 2
Analyzing the change of US Federal
Communications Commission
Digital Business Strategies and Change Management

Introduction
Although change has always been present throughout the history, today we live in a more rapidly
changing environment, since the wide spread and use of communication and information
technologies have contributed towards this direction (Melchor, 2008). Change has many levels
and can happen for individuals, an organization, or the society as a whole (Reiss, 2012), and the
“winners” often share the same characteristic of being able to effectively manage change and
take advantage of those situations (Paton & McCalman, 2008).
Organizations, in order to remain competitive and not be left behind in this new challenging
marketing environment, often have to undergo fundamental changes (Kotter, 1995) and this
applies to both the private and the public sector. Public sector organizations though, have
significant differences with the ones from the private sector when it comes to change, due to a
variety of reasons such as their different dynamics, bureaucratic design and the need for change
itself (Sminia & Van Nistelrooij, 2006). Thus, we can understand that change is not an easy
procedure and it involves a high degree of complexity.
In this essay we are going to see and analyze a case of change in the public sector and more
specifically how the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) achieved its IT
modernization, as described by Desouza et al. (2019). In order to perform the analysis of the
case, we will apply two different frameworks and then critically examine the results and discuss
our findings. The first framework that is used, is Kotter’s eight steps for a successful
organizational transformation (Kotter, 1995), while the second one derives from the paper of
Fernandez and Rainey (2006) and presents the eight factors that can influence the outcome of
change initiatives.
Description of the FCC case
Before this huge transformation that took place, the US FCC was spending most of its IT budget
in maintaining its old and outdated systems, which were prone to failure and vulnerable to cyber-
attacks. Although the previous years, many efforts for IT modernization have taken place, these
efforts remained uncompleted and produced fragmented results due to the frequent changes in
the organization’s top management. The above facts, resulted in a lower employee morale and a
fear for transformation from their side.
The first key person that played an important role for this transformation, was the organization’s
new CIO, who initially decided to conduct an inventory of the organization’s infrastructure,
regarding both the IT and the human capital. An IT tech team was assigned with the task of
evaluating the current IT infrastructure and its level of vulnerability to cyber-threats, while an
effort was made to understand the opinions and views of all the involved stakeholders, towards
the modernization of IT. Getting regular feedback from the diverse stakeholders and engaging
them in the whole transformational process, were considered highly important.
Overall, the FCC moved 207 IT systems into public cloud environments and commercial service
providers, managing this way to reduce its expenses for maintaining systems by more than 35%
of its total IT budget. Moreover, achieving this without an increase on the budget, resulted in an
increased availability of funds that could be further invested on development. Regarding time,

the FCC managed to produce and introduce a new system in less than two days, which is
surprising, considering that this procedure used to last almost seven months (Desouza et al,
2019).
Presentation of the two frameworks
As already mentioned in the introduction, in order to perform the analysis of our case, we are
going to use two different frameworks.
Kotter’s eight steps to transform an organization
In his article “Leading Change”, Kotter outlined eight critical success factors for organizational
change, which are derived from his experience and observation of small and large organizations,
trying to do the same thing: make fundamental changes in order to survive and remain
competitive. He also pointed out that throughout this process, there are two important general
lessons. The first one is that the process of change is not something that happens simply or
quickly and that it is a complex procedure that requires a substantial amount of time, while
skipping steps will only lead to inadequate results and just create a false sense of speed. The
second one is that critical mistakes in any one of the steps, can potentially set us back,
jeopardizing our progress so far (Kotter, 1995). The steps are the following:
1.Establishing a sense of urgency: This first step is probably the most important one, since
without the proper motivation, people are not willing to help. So basically, what needs to be
done, is help everyone see the current situation and understand the need for immediate actions.
2.Forming a powerful guiding coalition: Usually a renewal starts with just a few people, but in
order to succeed in the long run, stronger cooperation and participation is needed, especially with
people that have strong leading skills from all over the organization (all departments).
3.Creating a vision: A vision is much more than numbers, projects and plans and clarifies the
direction towards which the organization needs to move. Having a vision that can inspire
everyone and the strategies to achieve it, is essential.
4.Communicating the vision: After creating the vision, communicating it throughout the
organization is equally important, so that everyone understands it clearly.
5.Empowering others to act on the vision: Although communication is essential, it is not
sufficient by itself. Everyone has to participate in the effort and be given the power to do so, so
that we can close the gap between the people formulating the strategy and everyone who
executes it. Also the obstacles of any nature, need to be removed in this stage.
6.Planning for and creating short-term wins: Since change is a time consuming process, short-
term wins are important, in order to motivate the people resisting change and also keep the
morale high.
7.Consolidating improvements and producing more change: Accomplishing short-terms wins is
one step, but the change needs to keep on and take advantage of it, to tackle even bigger
problems for a long-term change.