Risks
Because of the instant changeover, everything must be done in a fixed time schedule. This is a risky operation. The organization might not be ready yet for this, an incorrect dataset might be used, or the information system can get stuck, because of a lack of experience and start up problems. Also an incapable fall-back method can be a risk in implementing a system using the Big Bang (Koop, Rooimans and de Theye, 2003).
To illustrate some other risks, two examples will be given. The first one is the company Dow Corning, which used systems that were focused on specific departments. The management decided that they wanted to become a truly global company, that would use only one information system: an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-system. To adopt this new ERP-system, they used the big bang adoption type and they spent considerable time and effort reexamining its business processes. The company was prepared for the adoption and first conducted three pilot implementations, before using the new system across the global organization. Second, FoxMeyer adopted an ERP-system with ambitious warehouse automation software, using the big bang adoption to gain competitive advantage. But FoxMeyer seemed to have an overoptimistic management with unrealistic expectations, the change was too big and too drastic.This resulted in very high work pressure to meet the deadlines for all the employees. So unrealistic expectations of the management are also a risk (Scott, Vessy, 2000).
Dow Corning monitored the progress constantly and made decisions to make sure that the deadlines would be met. This was only possible with feedback and good communication. FoxMeyer failed in having communication and attention that was necessary to be able to give fast and effective feedback. They instead tried to minimize problems by ignoring them and gave discouraging criticism, which resulted in ambiguous feedback. This hindered organizational learning, something which is very important during an organizational change. So bad communication and ambiguous feedback are also risks when adopting a system with the big bang (Scott, Vessey, 2000).
Other risks are to focus only on the outcome, not on how to achieve this outcome and underrating the learning process for users. It is very hard to plan learning or knowledge, though these are necessary to be able to execute the big bang changeover.
Read more about this topic: Big Bang Adoption
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