Bogorad on the basics of Change Management – TechRepublic

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As always any LinkedIn.com links require you to be a member of the site and the group links require you to be a member of the group.

In recent weeks, I have posted two pieces relating how a discussion thread on the LinkedIn.com Chief Information Officer (CIO) Network group had led to an article on TechRepublic. The first of these was, The scope of IT’s responsibility when businesses go bad and the second, “Why taking a few punches on the financial crisis just might save IT” by Patrick Gray on TechRepublic.

This week, by way of variation, I present an article on TechRepublic that has led to heated debate on the LinkedIn.com Organizational Change Practitioners group. Today’s featured article is by one of my favourite bloggers, Ilya Bogorad and is entitled, Lessons in Leadership: How to instigate and manage change.

Metamorphosis II - Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 - 1972)

The importance of change management in business intelligence projects and both IT and non-IT projects in general is of course a particular hobby-horse of mine and a subject I have written on extensively (a list of some of my more substantial change-related articles can be viewed here). I have been enormously encouraged by the number of influential IT bloggers who have made this very same connection in the last few months. Two examples are Maureen Clarry writing about BI and change on BeyeNetwork recently (my article about her piece can be read here) and Neil Raden (again on BeyeNetwork) who states:

[…] technology is never a solution to social problems, and interactions between human beings are inherently social. This is why performance management is a very complex discipline, not just the implementation of dashboard or scorecard technology. Luckily, the business community seems to be plugged into this concept in a way they never were in the old context of business intelligence. In this new context, organizations understand that measurement tools only imply remediation and that business intelligence is most often applied merely to inform people, not to catalyze change. In practice, such undertakings almost always lack a change management methodology or portfolio.

You can both read my reflections on Neil’s article and link to it here.

Ilya’s piece is about change in general, but clearly he brings both an IT and business sensibility to his writing. He identifies five main areas to consider:

  1. Do change for a good reason
  2. Set clear goals
  3. Establish responsibilities
  4. Use the right leverage
  5. Measure and adjust

There are enormous volumes of literature about change management available, some academic, some based on practical experience, the best combining elements of both. However it is sometimes useful to distil things down to some easily digestible and memorable elements. In his article, Ilya is effectively playing the role of a University professor teaching a first year class. Of course he pitches his messages at a level appropriate for the audience, but (as may be gauged from his other writings) Ilya’s insights are clearly based on a more substantial foundation of personal knowledge.

When I posted a link to Ilya’s article on the LinkedIn.com Organizational Change Practitioners group, it certainly elicited a large number of interesting responses (74 at the time of publishing this article). These came from a wide range of change professionals who are members. It would not be an overstatement to say that debate became somewhat heated at times. Ilya himself also made an appearance later on in the discussions.

Some of the opinions expressed on this discussion thread are well-aligned with my own experiences in successfully driving change; others were very much at variance to this. What is beyond doubt are two things: more and more people are paying very close attention to change management and realising the pivotal role it has to play in business projects; there is also a rapidly growing body of theory about the subject (some of it informed by practical experience) which will hopefully eventually mature to the degree that parts of it can be useful to a broader audience change practitioners grappling with real business problems.
 


 
Other TechRepublic-related articles on this site inlcude: “Why taking a few punches on the financial crisis just might save IT” by Patrick Gray on TechRepublic and Ilya Bogorad on Talking Business.
 
Ilya Bogorad is the Principal of Bizvortex Consulting Group Inc, a management consulting company located in Toronto, Canada. Ilya specializes in building better IT organizations and can be reached at ibogorad@bizvortex.com or (905) 278 4753. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/bizvortex.
 

Maureen Clarry stresses the need for change skills in business intelligence on BeyeNetwork

The article

beyenetwork2

Maureen Clarry begins her latest BeyeNETWORK article, Leading Change in Business Intelligence, by stating:

If there was a standard list of core competencies for leaders of business intelligence (BI) initiatives, the ability to manage complex change should be near the top of the list.

I strongly concur with Maureen’s observation and indeed the confluence of BI and change management is a major theme of this blog; as well as the title of one of my articles on the subject. Maureen clearly makes the case that “business intelligence is central to supporting […] organizational changes” and then spends some time on Prosci’s ADKAR model for leading change; bringing this deftly back into the BI sphere. Her closing thoughts are that such a framework can help a lot in driving the success of a BI project.
 
 
My reflections

I find it immensely encouraging that an increasing number of BI professionals and consultants are acknowledging the major role that change plays in our industry and in the success of our projects. In fact it is hard to find some one who has run a truly successful BI project without paying a lot of attention to how better information will drive different behaviour – if it fails to do this, then “why bother?” as Maureen succinctly puts it.

Without describing it as anything so grand as a framework, I have put together a trilogy of articles on the subject of driving cultural transformation via BI. These are as follows:

Marketing Change
Education and cultural transformation
Sustaining Cultural Change

However the good news about many BI professionals and consultants embracing change management as a necessary discipline does not seem to have filtered through to all quarters of the IT world. Many people in senior roles still seem to see BI as just another technology area. This observation is born out of the multitude of BI management roles that request an intimate knowledge of specific technology stacks. These tend to make only a passing reference to experience of the industry in question and only very infrequently mention the change management aspects of BI at all.

Of course there are counterexamples, but the main exceptions to this trend seem to be where BI is part of a more business focused area, maybe Strategic Change, or the Change Management Office. Here it would be surprising if change management skills were not stressed. When BI is part of IT it seems that the list of requirements tends to be very technology focussed.

In an earlier article, BI implementations are like icebergs I argued that, in BI projects, the technology – at least in the shape of front-end slice-and-dice tools – is not nearly as important as understanding the key business questions that need to be answered and the data available to answer them with. In “All that glisters is not gold” – some thoughts on dashboards, I made similar points about this aspect of BI technology.

I am not alone in holding these opinions, many of the BI consultants and experienced BI managers that I speak to feel the same way. Given this, why is there the disconnect that I refer to above? It is a reasonable assumption that when a company is looking to set up a new BI department within IT, it is the CIO who sets the tone. Does this lead us inescapably to the the conclusion that many CIOs just don’t get BI?

I hope that this is not the case, but I see increasing evidence that there may be a problem. I suppose the sliver lining to this cloud is that, while such attitudes exist, they will lead to opportunities for more enlightened outfits, such as the one fronted by Maureen Clarry. However it would be even better to see the ideas that Maureen espouses moving into the mainstream thinking of corporate IT.
 


 
Maureen Clarry is the Founder and President/CEO of CONNECT: The Knowledge Network, a consulting firm that specializes in helping IT people and organizations to achieve their strategic potential in business. CONNECT was recognized as the 2000 South Metro Denver Small Business of the Year and has been listed in the Top 25 Women-Owned Businesses and the Top 150 Privately Owned Businesses in Colorado. Maureen also participates on the Data Warehousing Advisory Board for The Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver and was recognized by the Denver Business Journal as one of Denver’s Top Women Business Leaders in 2004. She has been on the faculty of The Data Warehousing Institute since 1997, has spoken at numerous other seminars, and has published several articles and white papers. Maureen regularly consults and teaches on organizational and leadership issues related to information technology, business intelligence and business.