Management of Change: The Role of Information and Information System

Considering 21st century's business environment, only the change can be taken as a constant. Therefore, business systems require flexibility and adaptability, and from the information aspect, they must be up-to-date with all fermentations in their environment. Survivors in nowadays market reality will have perfectly developed abilities of reacting, permanently improving and continuously implementing changes. Enabling this requires an Information System capable of accepting signals of arriving changes, and delivering them to managers as a quality in-time information. In this paper the focus is on characteristics and importance of information and Information System for proactive management decision-making. Despite its exceptional possibilities, Information Technology cannot gather knowledge. That can only be done by a human, therefore the task of Information Technology is to help the best as possible. Managers require a system which will enable organizational learning at each level. The question is which is the best way to close the circle: change management – information - learning – knowledge – decision-making – change management. Based on survey in chosen Croatian companies, there are pointed conclusions concerning how do managers in Croatia refer to changes, which are their fundamental information sources, which type of information system do they use, and how do they make their decisions.