Gartner: Change management needed before real-time data can flow

Computerworld - SAN DIEGO -- Senior executives may have a need for speed when it comes to obtaining and analyzing critical financial and operational information. But CIOs who are being pushed by top brass to deliver near real-time data so companies can quickly react to changing business conditions will have to work closely with business unit leaders to drive heroic cultural and business process changes to make it all happen.
That was the message from Gartner Inc. analysts and attendees at the research firm's Symposium/ITxpo conference held here this week.
"Organizations don't pay enough attention to change management, and this will be critical in driving the real-time enterprise," said Carl Schulz, a service manager at Delta Corporate Services Inc., a Parsippany, N.J.-based IT consultant.
Indeed, companies have "spent a lot of money on technology but we never really changed the underlying fabric of the organization," said Gartner analyst Steve Prentice. And building a real-time organization "is about [enacting] real change," he said.
That's easier said than done, especially for mature companies whose cultures have been doing business the same way for years. "If you've got a 30-year-old company with thousands of employees and multiple people who claim ownership of a given business process, it's going to take a long time to drive those changes," said Matti Salminen, a consultant at Hitachi Data Systems Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif.
For many companies, becoming a real-time enterprise will require business leaders to cede control of customer data and other information from their stovepiped business units and share it with other managers and executives.
And while collaborative technologies, Web services and enterprise portals can help companies pull operational information together quickly, the technologies themselves aren't useful unless organizations make significant changes to their underlying business processes.
Technology represents "just 10% of the iceberg," said Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for eBusiness at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Business processes, staffers and culture make up the other 90%, and managers "need to think about this and invest in it."
One way to drive cultural changes needed to support the real-time enterprise is by setting clear goals for elapsed time-reduction targets in business processes -- and factoring that into bonus incentives for managers, said Gartner analyst Mark Raskino.
Stephen Smith used just that approach when he was head of advertising and marketing at Stop & Shop Supermarkets Cos. in New England before he joined Gartner 18 months ago. In his role, Smith wanted Stop & Shop's advertising circulars to be printed faster than they had been.