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How you buy enterprise software can have more impact on project success or failure than what you buy or why you’re buying it.
Gordon delivers a keynote address to Codice, a specialist IM Consulting Services company in Brisbane, Australia.
You were hired for your skills and expertise. If your company forces you to use sub-standard tools, you can’t be effective in your role.
I asked a customer the other day why they were running an Information Management project. Her answer was refreshingly honest:
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said, “It just seems like the responsible thing to do.”
It was a great answer, and it got me thinking about The Promise of Information Management. Why are people doing this stuff? What is it that IM tools and technologies are really designed for? In my experience, the hierarchy of needs for Information Management looks something like this, with each need requiring fulfillment from the bottom up:
At the bottom, there’s the mitigation of risk. Effectively managed information lowers the likelihood of bad things happening to your information, and as a consequence, to your organization. Compliance is still the most common driver for people to invest in Information Management. That’s hardly a surprise since it’s the responsible thing to do. Any organization that faces public scrutiny needs to classify and control its information and implement consistent retention policies.
Higher up the pyramid, we encounter the reduction of cost. If we store our information effectively, we can spend less money storing things we don’t need. We can also recoup time spent on re-creating things we didn’t know existed. There are many ways that effective information management can reduce costs. (These are inevitably the things that end up in all the business cases, under the ROI section.)
Finally, at the pinnacle, there’s the incentive to innovate and to improve the way the organization functions — the ability to meet and exceed performance metrics and offer better solutions to customers, internal and external. Improved awareness, and greater access to knowledge. The benefits of efficient management of information result in people doing better business.
While these three tiers constitute the promise of information management, the reality is that the needs of knowledge workers are not being met by current IM solutions. Nearly all of the tools designed to manage information will be sold based on the benefits of improved productivity or designing better business process — but in fact are designed primarily to fulfill risk mitigation and/or cost savings. As an ECM consultant, I had to reconcile this bait-and-switch on a daily basis.
With Infovark Personal Edition now perilously close to its first public release, I find myself trying to determine how our new product fits into this information management promise. We’ve turned the pyramid upside down. We put innovation and knowledge awareness right at the bottom, as the platform that everything else is built on. Infovark contributes to cost saving only incidentally (our peer architecture doesn’t require any new servers or centralized storage) and we’ve actively removed a lot of the control, security and access barriers that compliance-oriented solutions offer.
We feel this aligns better with what the vast majority of business people actually need. Most knowledge workers don’t seem to care much about compliance or retention. That’s a management concern. They also seem largely uninterested in cost control. What we hear from people working with information daily is that they want an authoritative source of reliable information, the answers when they need them, and a way to learn what they don’t yet know. They focus on the revenue side of the equation, on pursuing opportunities, on delivering value.
What IM has traditionally seen as base level needs — retention, security and control — we at Infovark see as advanced needs that can be addressed only once we have first fulfilled the more pressing needs of the individuals within the organization. You have to increase transparency and information awareness first, then optimize the way information flows, and only afterward can we look at what risk mitigation policies makes sense.
Yeah, the management team might not buy this approach. But we think everyone else will.
I’ve developed a sixth sense for failed enterprise software deployments. Yes, it’s an odd superpower to have — I’d much prefer the ability to stop bullets in mid-air or to leap tall buildings — but it’s one that served me well when I was a consultant.
In previous jobs, I’d be the technical expert brought in to help at to crucial moments in the enterprise sales cycle: pre-sales and post-sales. These are the points immediately before and after the handshakes and the signing of the check. These are the moments when all eyes in an organization are focused on the new, shiny software and hardware. These are the make-or-break moments for a technology vendor.
But these moments of heightened attention don’t usually make or break a large-scale IT implementation. Those happen long before or long after the vendor has disappeared from the scene. Really, my job was to spot any additional opportunities during the pre-sales period — or to help identify ways we could stand apart from the competition. Or it was to clean up after the sales guy had deposited his commission.
But although I’m fluent in geek and can cut code with the best of them, the source of my super power rests in political science 101.
Yes, that’s right. I was a liberal arts major.
If you want to understand a physical system, it helps to understand the forces that affect it. If you want to understand a human system, you need to understand the groups at work.
There are four groups at work in any large enterprise software project. There’s the software vendor, the organization that bought the software, and the consultants that implement the software.
Whoops. I said four, didn’t I? That’s because within the organization there’s actually two main groups involved: those who use the software and those who provision the software.
The secret to sniffing out a rotten enterprise software implementation is recognizing these groups and identifying how well their interests are aligned. In successful implementations, all the key players have complimentary goals and objectives. In failed implementations, these groups are working at cross-purposes, if not actively trying to sabotage each other.
Sabotage is a harsh word, isn’t it? But what else would you call:
Even in cases where everyone agrees to the broad objectives and goals of a project, the competing interests of groups and individuals can slow or block an implementation. The old political science adage for this is “where you stand is where you sit”. Some examples:
And if all that sounds dysfunctional, you should see what happens to the projects!
Yes, technology is hard. Breaking old habits is difficult. Not everyone enjoys learning new stuff. But these things can be addressed with planning and communication.
But changing the way people work — changing the way that a company does business — that’s a wicked problem.
To address a wicked problem, you need more than fancy tools. You need leadership. You need pioneers. And you need a mission.
Because without those things, these competing groups — and the interests that drive them — will pull your project apart.