In researching Master Data Management, I found an interesting article on the Information Management website dealing with the “Top 5 Mistakes in MDM Delivery”. The entire article contains wisdom everyone should heed when starting out to create a MDM solution:
- Do not overanalyze the requirements.
- Have the big picture in mind from the start.
- Determine the modeling approach to use.
- Use a holistic approach that includes both analytical and operational points of view.
- Do not underestimate the political dimension.
The last point caught my attention. Having been in the industry for more than 20 years, I have had a bit of experience with the political aspect of an implementation. Over time, I have learned that where two or more are gathered, politics is to be found. Maybe experienced is a better word for it.
I have been involved in simple accounting implementations with only one person and huge enterprise implementations where I had to work with many more people to get a system up and running. In every case, politics came into play. Sometimes it was subtle and other times not so much. I was always the outsider coming in to change everything. More like to ruin everything if you ask some of them.
After time, you come to expect the resistance and the accompanying politics. But, you always hope each project will be different. That this next one will be met with pure joy and elation and everything will go smooth as silk. This is rarely, if ever the case.
So why does politics come into play? Remember, the person coming in to change things is the outsider. No matter how much experience we may have in an industry, or with the client, we do not and cannot know everything.
These people own their systems and the data within them. They know everything about what they do and they typically do it well without our help. This is true even when the systems are manual, horribly outdated, or failing. In some of my implementations, the express goal of the new system was to break the ownership cycle and open the data up for use by management in making intelligent business decisions, really!
One of my clients was told on a regular basis that his business was profitable and doing very well. This was always backed up by hand written financials presented to the president and the board during the bi-annual board meetings. Again, really! I don’t need to tell you that the politics involved in this extreme form of data ownership was difficult.
So what do we do, when implementing a new system? Whether the new system is a new application, a data warehouse, or a master data management solution the approach needs to be well thought out and as gentle as possible.
Always take into account the emotional aspect of data ownership. The longer the person has owned the data the more emotionally attached they become. Anyone messing with the data is messing with them. This makes it very important to sit down with the owners and demonstrate to them that their data is as safe in the new system as in the old one.
In cases where people have been in the organization for years, changes in their routine are very stressful. Gently introducing the new procedures and routines is very important when working with some people. They need to be shown how much easier and more accurate their job will be with the new system.
Many times, the best approach is to show how the changes this person experiences, including loss of ownership, can benefit the organization as a whole. Work to change that focused ownership to a broader view of contributing to the success of the company. In a Master Data Management solution it may help to point out that relinquishing full ownership of the data means that the data they have will become more useful to them in the long run and that it will keep everything more current within all departments that track the same type of data.
Playing politics is difficult. Often times you simply have to step out of the line of fire and ask management or the internal project manager to help out.
The easiest implementation I did involved 23 employees changing an accounting and sales management system over to a completely different one. Some of the employees were very resistant to the change. However, the manager spearheading the project decided to do an initial conversion and work through the main issues. After determining that we had discovered the majority of the issues, she had me do one more
more conversion. When that conversion was complete she printed final reports from the old system and simply turned it off and had it removed. Remarkably, there were very few additional issues and everything went extremely well.
In case you are wondering about the implementation I mentioned earlier with the hand written financials, they are on the new system. However, the financials are still being created by hand from reports even though they can be printed directly from the system. Sometimes you just can’t get everyone on board and have to leave it completely to management to handle it. Sometimes even they have trouble with the politics.
Posted Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 3:34 pm by jknowles
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