Bringing Digital Innovations to Organizations

Changes are difficult, right? Regardless of where changes are introduced – either in personal lives or professional settings.

Originally posted on datapolicywonk

Comparing to a situation when you want to loose weight: you know you need to get on a diet and exercise.

You need to commit to it, find exercise somehow motivating and in the process of many (many) months, trials and fails start carving out those abs and rest of the killer body. But what you are actually doing is committing to a better, healthier life style.

Yes, it takes time, it takes tools (diet and daily gym routine) but essentially it is not the gym and protein that get you there, it is the commitment to the new regiment, to introducing change, that will enable rocking the new you, right?

Change and commitment to change is hard, there are so many throwbacks, setbacks and challenges to faith, but results are well worth it in the end.

Same thinking applies to changes in professional setting.

New trendy tools like digital innovations, application of big data, business intelligence tools will not make your organization better by themselves. Improvement comes once people in the organization commit to taking a leap of faith and actually using these powerful new tools to take their personal work and operations of the organizations they belong to the next level of competency and growth.

For a change to genuinely happen in organizations there needs to be a buy in from both organization’s staff and management.

For such an overall buy in to happen changes that are being introduced have to have connection to the current brick and mortar operations of the organization and be introduced incrementally.

So if organization wants to get in top shape, perform better and be healthier it takes a lot of human effort to thoroughly and thoughtfully integrate changes in organizations day to day operations by using new technologies and tools, rather than just having access to tools themselves.

In my experience, it bringing in digital change is rewarding, transformative and enables employees to focus more on providing quality service, rather than spending too much time on the administrative concerns.

Also to me personally, it seems almost ludicrous that organizations would not use digital tools (like data and document management and actually choose outdated paper forms of data delivery to electronic ones). I am sure in a history of organizational development, entities that are falling behind on using new tools will lag behind and fail.

But changes should not be implemented for changes sake. It should be a well thought out process, streamlined and able to incorporate as much of the existing processes in the new more efficient digital environment. Also failure to innovate does not usually derive from quality of tools that organization decides to use for its innovation efforts, it comes from fear of the staff or management to implement change and therefor do not provide buy in.

Here is how a simple matrix of how possible outcomes for innovation environment might look like:

Innovation Matrix – When Will Bringing Change Work, and will it Not?

Option 1: There is Buy in and there is brick and mortar connection

This is not only the most optimal, but also the only way to bring meaningful changes to an organization. Buy in needs to exist not only from management but from employees as well, as at the bottom line staff will carry the grunt of the work and if everything goes to plan will reap most of the benefits that innovation can bring to their daily operations.

In terms of buy into bringing new solutions and processes in the workings of the organizations what needs to happen is a consensus, and clarity in advantages of the new model over the existing one and an honest answer by the management to any concerns employees might have (in terms of downsizing or reorganizations of the current model of operations)

Also for a level of buy in described previously, there needs to be a meaningful connection to how operations are carried out in the current model. Change needs to evolutive step or broken down to incremental improvements rather than being disruptive. It creates a shorter learning curve and maintains the level of support for the change (aka buy in) on the needed level for the change to be successful.

Option 2: There is Buy in but there is NO brick and mortar connection

This is a tricky one and can go both ways – it can become a successful change or just one of the ideas that did not take on in the organization. Problem here is operational, although there is good will to move organization forward, the proposed solution was not thought through and looks intimidating to the staff or to the management, lacks connection to how operations were performed before, does not offer enough testing and training, or pick your choice to why it will not work. It means not going back to drawing board completely, rather a more detailed plan is needed to bring the change in.

However, if management is not able to deliver on an idea that does not seem too intimidating to the overall staff, level of buy in starts to dissolve quickly and it will go to no-go zone of innovation implementation.

I have seen organizations that are willing to make a change but not willing to think about the process itself. One of the great ways to see how process works is to pilot it, and through trials and errors see what works, what can be polished to work better and what needs to be scraped. But if there is no diligent preparation process, it will just become an exercise without many lessons learned.

Option 3: There is no Buy in but there is brick and mortar connection

This is a tricky one too. It means that process is well planned out, but for some reason management or staff is not willing to come on board. People might feel intimidated by change, which is all fine and needs to be addressed in well thought out plan, but also there might be lack of trust that what is planned will be carried out as imagined.

If manager is able to get out of their comfort zone, and demonstrate commitment to the team as much as to the bottom line of the organization, than she/he has a shot at creating buy in. Being forthcoming about what planned innovations entail as well as being able to deliver on the optimal model of implementation helps. A lot.

Option 4: There is no Buy in and there is no brick and mortar connection

This kind of sucks right? You think you have this great idea, but it does not have any support from the staff and also they seem intimidated and flabbergasted at how it would actually play out.

There are a few options, and it goes back to exercising analogy – you need to work both on your form and your overall image, by putting in a lot of time both to plan out the idea and have staff on board.