Inside Insights: Impact of Organizational Change with Matt Florian

In this episode, Matt Florian of Comerit rejoins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss the importance of managing organizational change as enterprises take on cloud based analytics. It's not enough to choose an analytics tool. Successful companies take the time to look at how organizational change gets to be addressed; from awareness, decision making, implementation, and finally institutionalizing it. His key takeaway: Not addressing a change strategy will inherently increase your risk of not achieving your objectives for your cloud analytics initiative.

Matt has more than 25 years of leadership in data and enterprise architecture in numerous industries. He has successfully delivered enterprise data transformation projects for government, telecommunication, retail, manufacturing, and financial services sectors.

Matt began consulting focusing on data warehousing in telecommunication for national providers. Over the course of his career has consulted for Oracle, IBM, and Unisys across many industries. His leadership, experience, and clarity of technical topics earned him the trust of client executive leadership. Matt’s talent to develop and lead teams is the key to his successful delivery of projects for clients.

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Matt Florian

Mustansir Saifuddin

Innovative Solution Partners 

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:03.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Welcome to Tech-Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this third episode of a multipart series,  I welcome back Matt Florian of Comerit. Listen in as Matt and I discuss the importance of addressing organizational change. When you pursue a cloud analytics initiative, we'll drive into real-life scenarios to highlight the value of alignment of business and .IT

 

[00:00:35.440] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Hello Matt, welcome to Tech During Business. How are you man?

 

[00:00:39.370] - Matt Florian

I am doing very well. Mustansir, how are you sir?

 

[00:00:43.840] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Wonderful. Thank you for joining us today.

 

[00:00:48.490] - Matt Florian

I'm happy to be here, happy to join you once again. These have been fantastic talks and look forward to more.

 

[00:00:56.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Awesome. So I'd like to continue our discussion. I know we started this conversation some time ago where we dived into transitioning to cloud data warehouse and also looked into hybrid environments and some of the benefits that customers are reaping going that route. So today I would like to focus on organizational change in cloud analytics and why are they so important in the whole cloud journey? How does that sound to you?

 

[00:01:29.020] - Matt Florian

It sounds great. It's a conversation, a topic that is too often overlooked. So let's get to it.

 

[00:01:36.640] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Absolutely. So I think let's start with the basics, right? I mean, can you help explain the role of organizational change when it comes to cloud analytics? Can you just simplify that?

 

[00:01:49.690] - Matt Florian

You know, it's such an important piece on the cloud analytics and like I said, it's not discussed often enough. Being in IT for over 25 years, and you and I have both been around the block quite a bit and worked with different companies of all shapes and sizes. And their failures in analytics always come down to a very common thing, and that is they didn't incorporate the change, the organizational change that is part of it. And organizational change is very difficult in and of itself. Right. The study of literature says that the estimates of organizational change initiatives failed 60% to 70% of the time, and that's something that hasn't changed since the 70s. It's just a consistent theme. So lack of having good engagement, bringing in experts like you and I to go and do this and then relying on us to actually convey it, well, that's a big cost. Because if we don't have managers involved in organizational change and institutionalizing that is who they are, then going to the cloud is not going to solve your problem.

 

[00:03:05.590] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Absolutely. I think that being said, I know that's one of the biggest, bigger challenges especially is outside the realm of the technical delivery of objects. Right. But when you think about organizational change, what are some of the critical or change management components that customers get to have in place? Would you be able to dive into that detail about some of the critical change components that are very important?

 

[00:03:39.560] - Matt Florian

Sure. Organizational change, it's a body of knowledge that has been built up by business schools and organizational psychology has studied us and has given us a breadth of knowledge to build from and we have frameworks to work from. As a matter of fact, I think if you went and searched on Amazon today, you'd probably find 1000 books published in the last three or four years that talk about organizational change and how to succeed and everybody's opinion on it and what it comes down to. But I think that when you think about organizational change and you spoil it down and boil down what those 500 books, I have to say it really comes down to four really critical phases. That is awareness, making the decision to do something, implementing it and then institutionalizing it. And those are the four key phases of organizational change.

 

[00:04:45.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That's good to know and those are important areas, right? Especially when it comes to something that is new and it's very broad. When you talk about cloud analytics, we are talking about a lot of different things in play. So when you mentioned those critical change components, right, is there an example that you can share with us about any one of those?

 

[00:05:16.910] - Matt Florian

Yeah, so awareness really starts off with business and IT both come to an agreement, a recognition that there's a problem. And the problem is that you'll see when it comes to analytics are problems like we're not achieving our organic growth metrics, we're not lowering the cost, we're not gaining insights, we're reacting instead of being proactive and respond to the market. And those are all pieces of awareness. And awareness can also be that we're not making bright investments in technology. The business has been implementing different data visualization and analytics tools all across and nobody has a common platform. So as a result, spending a lot of money on a lot of different tools that are telling you different stories and those all can lead into that awareness. With awareness we have a problem, we're not achieving our goals, we're not controlling our costs, we need to do analytics better. And that really they can lead into decision, right? And those are all problems that everybody's seen, it's nothing new. And then the decision part then is, well we got to do something about this. And where I think a lot of companies stumble is that they jump to the decision and say, we're going to go cloud analytics.

 

[00:06:49.390] - Matt Florian

Well, cloud analytics is not a decision, it's an architecture, it's a technology. But the decision really needs to be a collaboration between the business and IT on what that vision is. Because they went and started using other analytics tools for a reason, they went outside and did things differently for a reason. There's a need that wasn't being met. So jumping to analytics and cloud analytics isn't the answer, it's creating a shared vision is the answer. What do we want this new vision to look like? And that very well could be cloud analytics. But it's cloud analytics and other things and other things in the cloud. So that really drives into that decision. We're going to do something and we now have a shared vision of what that is. We shared the architecture and our solution and how we're all going to do this. And we're going to achieve this within some set budget, which then drives us an execution go to do it. And execution still requires a whole lot of communication, though, because during execution, we may have had a great plan of what our decision was, but the execution comes down and we have to start making changes and adjustments and react to different things along the way.

 

[00:08:07.470] - Matt Florian

So we need to continue to communicate because we have a shared vision. We have to keep that vision alive. Everybody still has to be on board when we get done with this development that they're going to go, this is what I wanted, this is great, I want to be part of this. Then you get to that institutionalization. And this is where I think you and I both have seen these projects stumble hard, is the consultants get done, we leave, and the business is like, well, what do I do with this? How do I work this? And you know what? That's all right. I'm just going to go back to Excel. And they didn't institutionalize the change and all the work that you did and the business along that path, they need to develop their champions and they need to develop a pipeline of champions because the business owns that institutionalization side.

 

[00:09:02.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Absolutely. I think, and that's really the key message that you mentioned over here. Especially, a lot of times we see when you go into these kind of conversations, one of the biggest challenges that organizations face is these silos, right? These business units doing their own thing based on their comfort level, based on a tool they were exposed to. And those silos need to be broken down in order to have a cohesive approach in terms of going to a cloud analytics approach, right. So that takes me to my next segue question. Can you share a success story on a particular cloud analytics project where you have gone through the cycle? And what are some of the implementation steps? The right steps, I'll call the right steps to address that organizational change in that case. Can you share?

 

[00:10:03.340] - Matt Florian

Yeah, well, I'm glad you asked for a successful one. They are the hard ones to pull out of the hat sometimes because some projects are kind of a mixed bag of what success is. But we worked with a client just a few years ago on a self service project and doing a big move into cloud analytics space. And that project began not with a move to say we're going to do cloud analytics. That project began with the question from the IT department of what is our current visualization tools that are out there? What are people using? So we did a survey of the business and evaluated and analyzed what the different business practices and organizations are coming back with. We're using to look at the data because business assumed, IT assumed, we got this big cognitive implementation. People are just hitting this thing all the time, they're using it everywhere. And the reality was that according to the business, they were using their cloud, their Cognos to download large data sets and analyze them in other tools. So we found Tableau, we found Power BI, we found Looker, we found Alterix and we found a whole lot of Excel.

 

[00:11:31.460] - Matt Florian

And as I said, the business had a need and the existing structure wasn't working. So that led to that awareness and having that discussion with the business leaders of what's going on. And IT led awareness like, well, we really do need to standardize in what we're doing. Everybody has a favorite, but it's costing a lot of money. So, working with the business,  we built again, that shared vision. That said, there's a lot of people that like Power BI in that particular case. And you're already a Microsoft shop, you have a large Microsoft presence in Azure. So let's move your warehouse over to Azure and let's build a new vision of what analytics looks like and start freeing up data as data sets. So we built this model, this vision that IT would get out of the business of creating reports. And they would serve data, they would have data products. And in return, business would go and learn how to create their reports and consume the data that they needed so that both sides are being met. And the business was very much behind it. So when we built, we continued to work with the business on what this build looks like, what data sets are going to look like, and having very early testing in it, they're starting to build excitement and getting encouragement with it.

 

[00:12:56.550] - Matt Florian

And organizational change was a big part of this in my communication with the IT and the business owners. So we went on a roadshow, we would go and have host lunches with business stakeholders and people that are going to consume the data and say this is what the vision looks like, this is what the future is going to be, see how you can do all this stuff. And we let them go and hammer away on playing with dashboards and creating their own reports and creating excitement that says oh my God, I can go do this, I can make this happen. And when it finally came time to deploy and started deploying out different models, the business was on it and they picked up and they picked up their own community of practice, continued having champions of the data and continued to be champions of Power BI and build their own communities. And that institutionalized that change into their organization. So every now and then you'll have other trickles of Alteryx or Tableau come in from an outside consultant, but organizationally, they viewed themselves as a Power BI shop. And that's how they see themselves and that's how they react.

 

[00:14:07.690] - Matt Florian

And to this day, they still view themselves that way. And so it's like a good example of change, organizational change that took hold to support the deployment of a cloud analytics solution.

 

[00:14:21.560] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That's awesome. I think that the key takeaway for our listeners from this example seems like you completely flip the conversation. Make it more like ownership factor moves towards the business versus IT, and then business kind of took it on themselves to move forward with this approach, which is definitely the way to go forward.

 

[00:14:47.210] - Matt Florian

With cloud analytics, IT is just an enabler of that data. The actual consumer and taking action that's business; business needs to be very much part of this.

 

[00:15:02.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Absolutely. I think that kind of takes me to a conversation which is very critical, especially on some of these projects. Right. When you talk about cloud analytics, what are some of the cost implications when you don't have the right organizational change strategy in place? Because that's always on top of the mind of folks. What can go wrong, especially from a cost perspective. Can you share an example of this?

 

[00:15:34.960] - Matt Florian

Sure. Did you ever hear about that bridge in Alaska that they built? They built a bridge in Alaska. It's called the Bridge to Nowhere because it just built and then funding stopped. It actually ends in the middle of nothing. It doesn't connect with anything. That's exactly what happens; what will happen and can happen with an analytics project if you don't have organizational change. You run a high risk of putting a lot of money and a lot of time, investment and energy into building what could be a very transformative tool to the business to achieve goals and their objectives. And it goes nowhere. And that investment is just lost. You'll have no ROI on it because nobody uses it. And nobody uses it because that whole user experience of the business consuming the data wasn't taken into account and how they're going to change. You're asking people to stop using Excel to analyze every little thing and instead be analytics minded. That's a major shift. And it's not a badge against Excel. Excel does great things. I use Excel to do some analytics all the time. But to drive the business and to make shared collaborative decisions, you need a tool that's more informative than Excel, and you need a shared vision by the business of what it's going to be important.

 

[00:17:10.240] - Matt Florian

So if you're going to go and say, I want to take an analytics journey, the first question you have to ask is why and who's on the journey with you? And if you don't if you don't take business on that journey, then it's a bridge to nowhere.

 

[00:17:26.960] - Mustansir Saifuddin

A great example, for sure. I think that's in time and time again, a lot of folks forget about that and they want to go to the decisionmaking or the actual execution part, which is definitely very important. But without having that upfront work, which seems like this example you very clearly articulated, you will not be able to reach the goal that you set out for yourself. So I think that takes me to my closing question on this topic. What is one takeaway, one key takeaway that you want our listeners to leave with today?

 

[00:18:11.060] - Matt Florian

The key takeaway is that if organizational change is not part of your plan, it's not part of what's incorporated, then you might as well just put it straight over into the project risk register; that you run the risk of not achieving your project objectives. Because without it that's some semblance of this, you are going to run a high risk of not succeeding and having cost runovers by redoing things because the business was not fully on board. The business had an idea of what they wanted. But you and the business aren't in alignment on what the shared vision is and what it's going to actually take in order to make it happen. So if you don't want to run that risk, incorporate it, make it part of the project, and you will mitigate the risk. There's no risks, but you'll mitigate that.

 

[00:19:11.660] - Mustansir Saifuddin

What a great advice. I think I love that. I think that's one thing that if folks pay attention to it very upfront in the journey, they will pay dividends down the road. So thank you for sharing that. So I think with that, I like to thank you, Matt, for joining us. Again, look forward to more conversations on this topic.

 

[00:19:34.010] - Matt Florian

Thank you, I look forward to as well. As always, great talking to you Mustansir.

 

[00:19:43.460] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Matt shared the value of addressing organizational change as enterprises get ready to take on cloud analytics initiatives. His main takeaway if organizational change is not part of your plan, you run the risk of not achieving your project objectives. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting Isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.