Unlocking the full value from a change initiative

I had another conversation the other day about the value landscape. I’ve talked about this before and I wanted to touch on it a little bit again because I think it’s applicable to almost any type of project that you do, especially around business intelligence and anything within the analytics realm. I’m going to use Troux for this example. Troux, for those of you that don’t know, is an enterprise portfolio management software. It’s got a lot of specific use cases that help organizations get a fairly rapid return on investment. So an organizational command will acquire the Troux tool. They’ll get involved in specific programs to achieve their goals and pretty soon they’ve made this great progress. What happens as time goes on is they sort of lose a little bit of steam. The low hanging fruit that was there at the beginning goes away and then they start to wonder, “Well how come I’m not still getting the same benefit that I was getting before?”

I think that one of the things that organizations run into is that they haven’t thought a lot about how to take that information and use it to make a lot of incremental returns. What I mean by that is one of the big use cases organizations have for Troux is to look at their IT portfolios and figure out

• Where do I have redundancy
• Where do I have things that I can consolidate

So at the beginning there’s this huge value for a lot of organizations because it’s a unique way of looking a problem they haven’t seen previously. They get all this value really rapidly and then they start to slow down because they use the tool to make these big decisions but they’re not embedding that intelligence into their ability to make smaller decisions. That intelligence they use for the big decisions can also help them be able to make decisions farther down within their organization. It will get them that same return on investment only distributed out amongst more folks. This happens all the time.

I’m using Troux as an example because it’s easy to talk to but I think almost any business intelligence activity that goes on within an organization has this problem. It’s usually the impetus, some big problem that you’re trying to solve, some particular thing you’re trying to get insight into and there’s this big bang value proposition that goes out. Then unless the organization takes and figures out how to leverage that information within their processes, they stop getting that same big return. I think this is one of the biggest missed opportunities that we have within modern organizations.

We’ve got one of the most highly educated work forces that we’ve ever had and we’ve got all these capabilities to do advanced analytics and yet we haven’t really taken advantage of any of that to the degree that we could. In this example of having analytics that maybe get used by an executive but they’re never driven down into the business processes and to users who are probably quite capable of leveraging those to make decisions. They’re either unavailable or the processes don’t dictate that they leverage them. There’s this huge opportunity to capture value that is currently not being executed on and it’s simply because we’ve brought the capability into the organization to make better decisions but we haven’t built our processes to take advantage of that. I think it’s something that as you go through large change initiatives you need to really look at:

• What are the phases of this
• How is this going to drive value in our organization
• Where and when am I going to get ROI
• Really think about what happens when I’m in my post implementation world

I wrote a blog post awhile back about living in a post-Troux world but I think it’s just as applicable to any of these large systems that you implement that are supposed to give you greater insight into what you’re doing. You have to build it into your processes if you want to get all the value from it.