In article six of the series “Delivering Value Through Data,” we discuss the keystone for your data strategy.  We call it change management, but it addresses the people component of your strategy.  Why do we call it the keystone?  Simple – people are the key for each of the other components of your strategy.

• People choose and implement your technology.
• People create, document and follow (or don’t) your processes.
• People create, modify, integrate, analyze and use your data.
• People set your organization’s strategy and correlating data strategy.

Even in our world of artificial intelligence, it still comes down to people creating, managing and using those systems.

So, how do we get people to believe in your strategy and ultimately use your data to drive value?  This is where change management becomes critical. Done correctly, it will ensure your Data Strategy is successful in both the short and long term.  Your data strategy requires change in your organization.  The key to successful change is getting all the individuals in your organization to understand and, ultimately, take ownership and responsibility for your data and information.  This then extends out to external stakeholders so that you have a healthy data ecosystem.

You are already starting the first part of the change, which is recognizing the potential value of your data and investing the resources to put forward a data strategy.  Setting the tone from the top, committing resources and having a personal stake in the results are critical.  How do you take your belief and commitment to data and embed it into your organization’s culture?  Start with the five E’s. 

Changing your culture through the five E’s.

• Engagement
• Education
• Empowerment
• Experience
• Empathy

In Part One of this article, we will address the first three of the five “E’s”.  Part Two of the article will address the last two of the “E’s” along with some tips and how to be successful at integrating change management throughout your data strategy process.

Engagement is the start of the five E’s.  Simply put, if you can’t engage your organization, then the rest of the five E’s will have far less impact.  Engaging your organization goes far beyond email blasts, slogans, lunch and learns or organization-wide presentations.  It is about making a personal connection with each person to feel connected to the strategy, its implementation, and its integration into the organization’s culture.  While this may seem optimistic or unrealistic, it starts with a simple approach using stakeholder analysis.

The stakeholder analysis sorts individuals and groups into small units where you can “personalize” the messaging on why the strategy is essential, how it benefits them, and its impact on how they work.  We separate the stakeholder analysis into individuals and groups to make the process manageable yet effective.  The individuals on the stakeholder analysis are the leaders of the organization and the key influencers.  They are critical to the strategy’s success, and we use an enhanced stakeholder matrix that adds a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) component for crucial decisions and communications.  For the groups, it is vital to define them at the right level of granularity.  If they are at too high a level, you will lose the “personal” feel of the messaging, which hinders the connection to the strategy.  However, for large organizations too many groups may become burdensome when the messaging becomes messy and ineffective.  One key question to ask when you build your groups is, “Do they interact with the data differently than other people in their group?” if they do, it may be a good idea to break the group into smaller groups.  We tend to believe in smaller groups to ensure the messaging is more personal.  While building the matrix and corresponding communication plan takes more effort, the increase in effectiveness and engagement makes it worthwhile.  It is also essential to include key external stakeholders such as customers, vendors or other entities such as regulatory bodies in this process.

The communication plan tells how you activate the stakeholder matrix.  The communication plan ensures that you are consistent with your messaging across the organization.  Consistency is critical to changing your culture.  If you have consistent messaging in ideas, tone and timing, the recipients will tend to absorb the messages more quickly.  If the messaging is inconsistent, then the recipients have more leeway to reject the message.

A successful communication plan includes:

• Audience – use the stakeholder matrix
• Messages – consistent, reinforces and builds upon past statements, helps educate, based in reality – communicates challenges and successes
• Senders – Organization Leadership, Data strategy leaders and team members, Key influencers, Quick win participants
• Cadence – Organizational leaders less frequent – but higher impact, Data strategy leaders, team members more frequent and quick wins as they happen.

The communication plan tends to focus on the “push” method of communicating to the organization.  It is also important to have an online presence where everyone in the organization can get further information on the data strategy, and why it is important, it should also offer educational materials and outline the current status.  This is also a great way to see if the organization is getting engaged.  Higher activity on the “publish” side is an excellent sign.

Education is the second of the five E’s.  As you are working through your engagement plan, one of the first questions that comes up is, “What are we communicating?” This is where the education approach is vital.  Real change comes from knowledge, understanding, experience and commitment.  Telling someone to change can be helpful but showing them why changing can benefit them is far more impactful.  However, it is difficult to show someone the benefit if they don’t understand why it matters and how they are involved.

Education starts when you are building out your data vision. The data vision and data mission are focal points for all of your stakeholders. Well-written vision and mission statements enable the stakeholders to see how they fit into the strategy. It gives them a sense of why the strategy is vital for the organization.  From there, it builds.

Many people don’t understand how a single piece of data is used across the organization and how it ends up in different metrics and analytics.  Similarly, it shows how much data it takes to support a single transaction with a customer or vendor or an analytic such as forecasting.  Creating messaging and tools that show how data flows helps people understand how the data they touch is used and how it is created and maintained can be very impactful.  It can also develop a sense of community which generally drives higher data ownership and quality.

Education is most impactful when you use actual data from your organization.  Creating examples based on your stakeholder matrix may mean extra work, but it will drive better understanding and higher adoption.  As you get into the implementation, using your quick wins as an education tool is very helpful.  It reinforces the value proposition of the strategy and gives real-life examples to show how data helps the organization.

An education plan is like a communication plan or a training plan.  You base it on the stakeholder matrix, and it precedes your training.  It is also broader than a training plan since everyone in the organization will benefit from education and not everyone will need training for changes.  Part of your education plan is some basic education on data types, like the primer below.  It is beneficial to increase the overall level of data maturity in your organization. 

Follow the link to:

A data primer for your organization

Empowerment is the third of the E’s.  If your people do not feel empowered, it will be hard for them to fully engage in the process and take ownership of the data.  Empowerment comes from access to data, usage of data, ownership of data and trust.  However, along with empowerment comes accountability.  Your people are accountable for data quality and accountable for “appropriate” use of the data.  Shadow data, where people work outside the system, will no longer be accepted.

One way to empower your people is to foster their inquisitiveness about the data.  The more questions they ask about why you use specific data and how it is created or used in other areas, or why a certain person is the data owner drives their education and empowerment.  The opposite is also true – if you ignore or disregard their questions, they lose the connection with the data and ownership of it. 

Inquisitiveness about data will also lead to questions about access to data and, many times, the desire to use third-party data to enhance your internal data.  This type of curiosity will help drive data maturity and reinforce understanding how much data you need to make an informed decision.  Organizations that unduly restrict their users’ access to data slow down and retard the increase in data maturity.

Empowering people with data requires responsibility for making sure the data has context to tell the whole story.  Incomplete data or data with the wrong context can misrepresent reality which will drive mistrust of the data.  There are times where you don’t have all the requested data.  Understanding when you have enough of the critical data to decide is a sign of maturity and leadership.  Make sure you acknowledge the gaps and assumptions that you are making so everyone understands the risk.  Misrepresenting the data or completeness of the data is a red flag and must be addressed.

The last and perhaps most critical part of empowerment is to let the people use the data to make decisions.  Once the decision is made, track the results so they can see how well it worked.  Was the hypothesis correct? Were the assumptions accurate?  Did we have enough data or even too much data?  Did the data quality support the decision?  What can we learn to accelerate this decision or do we need a course correction to fix one of the questions above?

Keys:

• Give responsibility and increase accountability
• Foster inquisitiveness which drives ownership and education
• Ensure the data has the context to be used appropriately
• Appropriate access to data will help increase data maturity
• Make, track and enhance your decision process

The first three “E’s” have given you a framework for helping the people in your organization through change.  In Part Two of the article we look at the last two “E’s” Experience and Empathy which address how to help people absorb, accept and embrace the changes.