Change is Everything

Technology implementations, statistical analysis, discovering actionable insights, changing business processes, developing information use cases, measuring financial results, modeling business performance... All easy things to accomplish. I have been involved in dozens of projects where we have delivered some or all of these things. Clients have been on the precipice of dramatic business gains... yet many analytic projects do not deliver as promised.

Getting organizations and people to change is very difficult and is the real challenge when delivering strategic analytic solutions. By strategic analytic solutions, I mean solutions which could double a company's bottom-line performance.

Overlooking change management issues will doom projects to the dustbin.

The types of analytic solutions in the marketplace, fraud detection for insurance and banking, pricing optimization and assortment planning for retail, forecasting for retail and manufacturing, retail customer loyalty require organizations to be able to create, assess and act upon the output of sophisticated analytics and reporting and to be able to measure the impact of your actions, learn from those actions and adjust your operating plan.

There are two types of change required: surgical change to business processes that are impacted by information and strategic change which requires an organization to be change its management style and mindset to become analytically driven and willing to experiment.

Surgical change while narrow in scope can be painful. Employees who execute business processes may not have the skills to assess, review and take action based on analytic insight and business intelligence reporting. Employees who were otherwise well regarded and successful in their positions may find themselves floundering to adapt to the changes. With information based business execution comes transparency and accountability, further compounding employees willingness to accept change.

Changing the management mindset in an organization is even more difficult. When decision making has been largely based on intuition, or "how we've always done it" and the impact of decisions has not been measured, it becomes a monumental task to get employees, middle managers and executives to change the way they make decisions and learn how to make better decisions. I don't know many companies who track their decision performance!

Recognizing these issues before embarking on strategic analytic initiatives will improve the likelihood for success. Setting appropriate expectations for time to results should be set. Implementing a change management program and plan is mandatory. Crawl, walk and run is highly recommended. Expect the change management issues to long outlive the technology implementations.

Seek outside help as change from within is very difficult. Select a change management method that accomodates both surgical change and organization paradigm shift.

Analytic technology implementations take 2 to 4 months. If you can overcome the change issues, I think every organization is 12 to 18 months away from doubling and more their bottom-line profits. Start now...


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