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Top1. Introduction
Information systems and technologies (IST) play an increasingly critical role in organizations vis-à-vis their established relationships with the environment. Predicting future economic activities and societal trends is based on shifting information and IST are responsible for its availability and quality. Information is key to unveiling economic and social analytics and is a central resource to uncovering the relationship among different stakeholders (Oliveira & Anunciação, 2019). The handling of information and the generation of knowledge are dependent on IST for the organizational processes’ management and activities and to support customer needs.
Over the years, organizations, particularly those in the health sector, have become information-intensive organizations and/or pluralistic organizations (Asad Mir, Rezania & Baker, 2020). They centralize their IST as it is difficult, if not impossible, for hospitals to provide health care services to people without accessing their medical records, to develop new knowledge without capturing the history logs of different patients or to prescribe new treatments without analyzing previously administered medication and outcomes. Altogether, this calls for an awareness of the prominence of the information provided by IST to the managers of these institutions with a growth sensitivity to the significance of IST which has led organizations to look at them as driving forces of organizational performance in terms of the quality of services delivered (Garrido, Kristensen, Nielsen, & Busse, 2008).
Healthcare organizations (HCOs) such as hospitals are burdened with data-intensive activities that generate information and consolidate knowledge. Information and knowledge are often viewed as critical assets, resources of driving actions and evidence to make decisions. While information technologies (IT) have led innovations in HCOs, chiefly, at the level of specialized activities developed, such as diagnosis and exams, the specificity of almost all such activities, which highlights the importance of proper management, is still supported technically by IT. For innovation to thrive, HCOs need to integrate functional, informational and technological requirements, adjusting to the dynamics and modus operandi of the operation and the relationship with the new technological requirements vis-a-vis evolving market opportunities. In this context, change management (CM) evolves (e.g., Ammenwerth, Iller, & Mahler, 2006). It is this permanent strand of change that must be matched with a process, or processes, that make it possible to monitor the evolution of organizational activity and consolidate the transition from an existing reality to a new one with increased efficiencies and effectiveness (e.g., Weick K., 2000;Weick & Quinn, 1999).
In this paper, the overarching goal is to show that CM is key to shaping the economic organizations’ performance. Here, we adopt Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as an internationally known methodology to elicit perceptions of IST managers in Portugal. Importantly, the IST services are crucial to operate and support organizational activities and the ITIL methodology enables these managers to facilitate service management via well received practices so as to adjust the services provided by IT to business core objectives (Cartlidge, et al., 2007).
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The next section, Section 2, overviews the extant CM literature. Section 3 highlights the relation between ITIL and IST change phenomenon whereas Section 4 shifts focus to the health sector, detailing the case of managing HCOs in Portugal. In Section 5, the two-stage investigation of managerial perceptions via the ITIL methodology is described while Section 6 presents the study results. Section 7 then follows with an analysis of the results with a model proposal that best encapsulates the study results provided in Section 8. Finally, Section 9 provides summative insights and concluding remarks.