Change Management

Much of the success of BI for enabling performance improvement and increased profits depends on changes to business processes that make a difference in results. At a minimum this entails injecting better business information and analytical tools into an existing process. Many times, leveraging BI requires changing or creating a business process, and sometimes it requires broader organizational changes. The organizational changes can be focused on how BI is managed as a program – perhaps implementing a BI center of excellence organization. Organizational changes can also be focused on the processes and people a business unit needs to really leverage BI. For example, the unit may need to hire people with more analytical expertise. We discuss these concepts in depth in our book, The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence.

Because of the importance of organizational design and change management to BI success, DecisionPath uses elements of our BI Pathway Method to identify areas for potential change management and organizational design attention. Specifically:

• our BI Opportunity Analysis process identifies and prioritizes key business processes where BI can be leveraged;
• we develop as-is and to-be business process models for the priority processes where BI will be injected;
• we use the BI Readiness Assessment to identify BI adoption risks and to identify BI delivery capabilities that need to be developed;
• we use the BI Maturity Model to assess the starting point for organizational changes in how information is used to improve performance; and
• we use change management and program management processes to help guide organizational evolution as need be.

As a rule, organizations we have worked with prefer incremental change to radical change, so we generally chart a general direction for change and work with our clients to implement the changes on a timetable that is compatible with the organizational culture and with its capacity to handle change at any given point in time. This reflects the reality that organizations often have more than one performance improvement or profit improvement initiative in the works at any given time, and thus there are practical limits to the pace of change.