CHANGE MANAGEMENT: IDENTIFYING CHANGE AGENTS USING SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS IN AN ERP IMPLEMENTATION

Change management is the process of successfully shifting an organization from one stable state to another leveraging tools, technology & people management in a way that doesn't jeopardize the current organizational stability. Change management for any organization big or small could be extremely challenging depending on its understanding of what is the change and how it will impact the people within the organization. There are 2 aspects to change management-process aspect & people aspect. Process aspect is often paid more attention & people aspect is overlooked while planning for a change. In this research paper, we focus on how to handle people aspect of change management .We propose leveraging social network analysis through network and graph theory to identify change agents in an ERP implementation situation in an organization. This solution approach aims at helping an organization sail through the challenges posed by the reluctance of people towards adopting and adapting to the change. We provide key metrics and their interpretation to analyze who are better potential change agents in an organization and what makes them ideally positioned to drive and percolate change successfully to the ground level. We also demonstrate the methodology and share the results of how we identified key change agents in our sample data for this research by looking at various centrality measures from social network analysis using Gephi.