Conceptualizing organizational change management in the context of the enterprise life cycle

<jats:p>In a turbulent environment, an enterprise’s ability to change the parameters of its own organization becomes no less important than its ability to produce goods. Transformation projects often fail to achieve their stated results, not so much because of a lack of tools for designing change programs, but because the enterprise life cycle is represented without regard to its complex, holistic structure. The article aims to conceptualize organizational change management within the enterprise development life cycle. The methodological basis of the study is an ontology-oriented conceptual design procedure that reconstructs the domain’s semantic structure by identifying basic concepts, establishing relations among them, and testing the concepts for semantic clarity and consistency. Organizational change management is defined as the adaptive configuration of a portfolio of interrelated transformation initiatives aligned with the elements of the enterprise’s multidimensional development profile and the parameters of transformation pressure acting on it. Based on the criterion of explanatory indispensability, a system of twenty-two basic concepts is identified and grouped into four semantic blocks (system, state and development; target configuration and portfolio; feasibility and management; responses, institutionalization and outcome), along with thirty-one generic semantic relations. An ontological model of the relationships among the basic concepts is developed, with the life-cycle profile as its central element. Conceptual propositions for change management are formulated, and the logic for deriving composite concepts is explained. The study’s scientific contribution lies in further developing the conceptual foundations of organizational change management within the enterprise development life cycle. Unlike stage-deterministic and purely procedural approaches, the proposed framework separates the domain’s semantic structure from its analytical formalization. Keywords: organizational change management, enterprise life cycle, ontological model, organizational configuration, change portfolio, transformation gap, conceptual engineering.</jats:p>