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Commentary: Take the ‘C’ word seriously |
You can contact David Harvey, the author of this section, by e-mail on dharvey@olapreport.com if you have any comments, observations or user experiences to add. Last updated on January 9, 2006.
If you think that delivering OLAP, business intelligence and performance management solutions is just about delivering superior tools and smarter applications, think again. Build it and people are bound to use it is not a wise assumption to work on. The implications for corporate politics, the internal balance of power and self-interest are issues on which success can tip one way or the other. Get all the specifications and process issues right and you can still come unstuck if you neglect the human factor.
Take IBM, the subject of an OLAP Report case study.
“The number one issue is culture,” says Marc Berson, Manager, Finance Business Intelligence and Audit within IBM Finance Information Technology. “Cultural adoption is a critical success factor for a BI application. Technology, architecture and development are secondary.”
Because Berson relied on persuasion, rather than edict, the readiness of people to adapt their working practices to make full use of the new suite of financial applications was absolutely critical. Berson is not alone in seeing business intelligence projects in cultural terms.
The ‘C’ word crops up regularly in the context of business intelligence and OLAP projects. When project managers reflect on the most difficult aspect of implementing a new system, culture and change management come high on the list. Culture was cited as the number one implementation issue in the Business Intelligence Survey of Performance Management Practices.
How a new system impacts working lives is a potential showstopper – and the more discretion individuals can exercise, the more they are likely to look critically at the personal implications involved. When business intelligence applications are intended for use by managers, there is all the more reason to take the change and culture issues seriously.
People can be reluctant to use new systems for a host of reasons, some of which are readily understandable, others that are less obvious but nonetheless highly important. The question for project managers is what the implications are likely to be and how they can be managed.
Many of the causes of resistance can be anticipated and defused. Plenty of useful work has been done to help managers understand the issue of change management. One of the longest-running studies of corporate change has been conducted by ODR, founded by psychologist Daryl Connor.
ODR found that beneath the murky surface of staff intransigence, lack of co-operation and dogged resistance, people are simply following some predictable behavioural patterns that need to be firmly managed.
People are likely to duck when they see a new system coming their way variously because of the not-invented here syndrome, a reluctance to change established working habits, an inability to see any personal upside. Or it could be a fear, well founded or imaginary, that a new system will expose their performance with an unwelcome clarity. All these and other factors can argue for individuals to stay wedded to an inefficient but more comfortable status quo. Ultimately, self-interest may be more powerful than any other argument as Machiavelli, the Sixteenth-Century arch-exponent of political guile, pointed out in what is still one of the most incisive analyses of managing change.
Any ruler, he argued in The Prince, who wants to establish a new regime faces two main problems. First, all those who flourish under the existing arrangements will dig their heels in to preserve their current advantage. Second, others who can see nothing in the proposed change for them will have no motivation to co-operate. Much the same principles apply in a corporate context.
The solution has to involve strategies that overcome the overt and covert reasons for resistance to change. One obvious antidote to the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome is to involve those who are going to be affected in the planned change from the outset.
The OLAP Surveys confirms that IT-led, as opposed to business-led, projects have lower success rates. Machiavelli may not have recognized the term buy-in, but he would almost certainly have understood the principle.
Change psychologists have established that once you take away people’s ability to control their own destinies they invariably go into resistance mode. Give them a role in designing the system and you provide a sense of ownership. There is, of course, also a much more practical reason for doing this. Without appropriate user input any system is much more likely to be unfit for a practical business purpose. No one wants to use a system designed to solve a problem that doesn’t apply to him or her. A business-led development team gets round the relevance problem as well as scoring on the buy-in front.
You may have representatives on board the project team. But rolling out the system to thousands of people, the target for IBM’s CFO Portal, is another matter altogether. Since Berson’s preferred strategy was not to force people to adopt the system but take it on voluntarily, its advantages had to be sold.
It was an uphill battle in areas where some managers were able to hand off report generation to specialist analysts. Now they were being expected to do it for themselves. At first, they saw it just as a move to get them to take on low-level work. It was not until they came to see the advantages of exercising tighter control of the contracts they managed and producing instant answers to their questions that resistance gave way to enthusiasm.
The message is clear. Those responsible for OLAP, business intelligence and performance management projects need to understand the dynamics of change. The good news is that culture and change management have been well mapped. The not so good news is that the solutions are likely to take systems developers well beyond their comfort zone.
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