Struggling with adoption of Shared Integration Services in your organization? Welcome to 'Change Management'
I'm not very fond of putting ‘ change management’ in my title. It’s such a cliché and not sure if organizations really trust something like this even though everyone understands what this is about. But life is not fair, not to the extent we all like and world of Integration is even more unfair (ask your Integration lead and they will tell you the stories). Just couple of months back, I was having very intense discussion with a CIO of one of the major retail businesses on the topic of IT shared services, and issue on hand was the frustration that this gentleman was going through because of not being able to generate interest and motivation in larger IT organization community as well as business units to go shared service way. While on his interest part, his direct career and credibility as a leader was at stake, more importantly, it nullified lot of effort and investment that was made to conceptualize, design and build the shared service entity.
And this has not been the only unique or isolated story that I have come across. Specially with rapidly changing and evolving IT organizations, this has been a common struggle to break the current mindset and conventional working patterns and move the entire organization toward a new way of doing things. It typically will involve the business app teams, infrastructure team, business owners and managers, vendors and all other parts of the eco-system that are involved in making service delivery work.
I know there are plenty of frameworks, concepts and management guidelines available as far as change management is concerned so this will be sheer waste of time for me and others to have those reproduced here. Intention of this blog is more to bring experiential insight of what I have seen on the ground, what I discovered from my listening posts of very senior executives in large corporations running IT departments and presenting few important aspects here. So to simplify the matter, let us take two sides of the coin and see if the combined story helps elevate the understanding to some degree. First side of the coin is “what made organizations fail in adoption” and I’m sure you guessed the second side of the coin right, that is “what made organization win over the adoption battle”.
What made organizations fail in adoption?
At granular level, there are many different types of factors depending on organization culture, size and business that in my view contribute(d) to the failure. Here is what my learning says what’s behind the scene making organizations fail (in adopting new delivery models) despite all good intentions:
- Does it really matter for your Bosses? – if you are running the center like an isolated baby and no one on the top really cares for it, you are sitting on a failed program already. Well, still there is 10% chance where your individual heroism and extraordinary brilliance could take you there, but then you are best judge if you want to bet on that 10%...:-)
- Has anyone figured out the value realization? – while you may know what you are trying to do, if others only get to see the changes (read that as trouble and pain) and expectations, they are less likely to be your buddy and partner in the change. Change the game from being ‘change troublemaker’ to ‘opportunity maker’. This can only happen if you are absolutely clear how your plan delivers value to stakeholders. In my view, IT management is increasingly becoming closer to business management discipline and sooner than later, we will see that IT managers need to become business managers. This will mean that every strategy/plan that is put forward, IT managers need to drive it from business value side and manage the business value outcomes of the investments. That will transform them from ‘Implementer’ class to ‘Business partner’ class.
- Do you have champions working for the change or you are just ordering? – If you own the competency center, it is not enough just you to believe in it and run the change in instructional model. Your leadership team (reporting to you presumably, you never know now a days) need to share the vision, the dream of aspirations and the passion to create a better portfolio. Many of the competency centers really become failed attempt because there is just one person fighting the battle and rest of the team doesn’t really feels any stake in the change. So life goes on for them as usual with little bit hassles every now and then from their boss. Well, that’s fairly tested recipe for failure. So as I see, as the owner of the competency center, it should be your first imperative to create a dream in your immediate leadership team under you and charge them with the roadmap of the change. Enable and empower them to come out from day to day hassles (that’s a investment worth taking the risk) and focus on the transformational change.
- Are you creating ‘documents’ or are you delivering the ‘change’? – I’m sure if you are thinking to invest into competency center program, you have ‘strategy’, ‘plan’, ‘roadmap’, ‘blueprint’, ‘business case’, ‘guidelines’ etc. fairly well sketched in your mind. And if you are sourcing the help from external vendor, a typical ‘consulting’ program might be very well underway. With that flavor of competency center program, my observation has been that organizations get tired/exhausted/done with heavy consulting deliverables with tones of ‘on paper’ deliverables. If you are serious about making the change, just exercise caution before having those tons of documents created. What I have experienced, many of such documents go straight into the bin after couple of months (actually weeks in some cases) because neither organization has any clue how to translate those documents into meaningful outcomes for the organization nor they have adequate skills to make it happen. So I suggest, since beginning, keep the goals/focus on create the change in the organization, creating newer capabilities and delivering improvements (to what exists) even if it takes longer than focusing on monthly deliverables on the paper.
Actually list goes on and on. I got tired writing this one and I’m sure no one wants to read 10 page blog either but I guess I have put forward the most important aspects. If topic evolves, I will put forward more variations to this for the second side of the coin. So feel free to put your comments/experiences and questions.
