Every so often, I’m fortunate enough to experience “breakthrough thinking” when working with a customer. I see innovative ideas just about everyday but rarely see them become something of significant business value. Too often, ideas never see the light of day because of something I was once told is called “the drift.” You know, statements such as, “that will never happen because the way it is around here is, blah, blah….” You’ve heard it before.
Well, just a few years ago, a customer asked to me to review the design for automation of their data quality process. The solution, while innovative, is not the part I want to tell you about. What made this a true breakthrough in my eyes was how he got the project accepted by the organization as a whole – from top executives on down.
The organization that sprouted this project idea is one I’ve worked with for nearly a decade. It’s full of bright people with innovative ideas for everything, it seems. Trouble is they have problems getting the ideas accepted within their organization, and consequently, these ideas are not funded. This is a common problem in many companies. However, one IT management individual stepped up and took responsibility for this latest idea and effectively championed the value to both the business and IT.
Inadequate communication had been at the core of the organization’s inability to get this sort of thing done in the past. Not specifically the verbal or written kind of communication, but the ability to articulate, understand and balance the needs and personal agendas across all departments/groups and at all levels of the organization.
Getting IT and the business to understand each other was a major breakthrough for this organization. To make it happen required the individual to acknowledge these points:
• The business owns the data (but they may not know it);
• You have to speak business benefits to business people (and it is not as easy as most people think);
• You have to build and maintain a relationship with your stakeholders through continuous coaching.
Once the above points were acknowledged, then it was possible to do the following in order:
1) Change the thinking within the management of both IT and the business to accept responsibility for the entire process related to the data. This was done by identifying the most important aspect of the proposed changes as it pertained to each stakeholder and obtain their buy-in that the changes were good for each of them.
2) Educate both sides on the benefits (often confused with advantages) of the solution. The advantage may be that a process takes less time to complete but the benefit is cost savings. Don’t confuse the two.
3) Coach the stakeholders to assist with communicating the benefits to their connections, thereby creating a sort of “tipping point” for the solution throughout the organization. It was critical to create a groundswell needed for large, high-cost, and/or radically new ideas as was the case with this project.
4) Convey passion about the benefits of the solution, in turn, making others passionate and supportive of the project and its stakeholders, fueling momentum for the project.
So, sometimes, it’s the means to the end that is most important. The breakthrough really was the ability of my customer to put himself in other people’s shoes throughout the organization, and sell them on what is important about this data quality project to each of them, individually. Then, articulate the expected benefits in a way that they all understand to get them to buy in. It was important for him to listen to the stakeholders first, understand what was important to them, and learn how to talk their talk to articulate the benefits and results. That’s a breakthrough that all companies should strive for in order to ensure their data management or data governance projects move forward.
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i have to agree with you, communication is the basis of all relations. with proper communication we can move innovations and inventions . like the communication softwares firms are using nowadays .
Posted by: goodsha | 04/09/2011 at 10:29 AM