Need lasting innovation? Change Management professionals and iPaaS tech are here to help

Get change management right, or you’ll go out of business

Search online for “change is hard” and you’ll get over 10 million results, ranging from inspirational quotes to peer-reviewed research on the psychology of status-quo bias. “Most people instinctively resist change,” says Heidi Davis, a Change Management Consultant with Expressworks International. “People tend to like the things they know – even if those things don’t work all that well.”

The impulse to resist change poses a very real – even existential – threat to businesses. Approximately 90% of companies on the 1955 Fortune 500 list lost that distinction by 2019, with many going out of business entirely. The hallmark of the resilient 10%? Innovation.

Lasting innovation requires more than just a big idea. What really matters is getting a big idea to permeate an organization so that meaningful changes ultimately impact the market. “It’s about getting people to buy-in, to truly adopt the big ideas,” Davis says. Organization should deliberately focus on ensuring adoption or else face a sobering reality. “70% of change initiatives fail within 2 years because the adoption rate was just too low,” Davis explains.

Change Management professionals drive adoption

Change Management professionals drive down the 70% failure rate through the deliberate application of proven frameworks. These frameworks help organizations activate internal change-agents to evangelize an initiative, instill employees with a tangible sense of purpose, and extract value from disagreements that occur throughout the process.

Effective Change Management can also prevent severe hits to productivity, an operational consideration that can easily cost thousands of dollars per minute in lost revenue. “We've all been on a team when a change was rolled out that took us by surprise. Lack of awareness and training led to frustration and additional time to complete critical tasks that used to be instinctual," Davis says. "Part of my job is to reduce the learning curve so new tools or products do not interfere with productivity.”

Slow responses from technical resources drives employees to find workarounds

Employees often resist adoption due to pragmatic concerns that erode trust, like high latency for an IT ticket. “If you put in an IT ticket because your apps aren’t doing what you need them to, and you don’t get a response for days or weeks, the message you receive is that you’re on your own,” Davis explains. When support does finally arrive, it’s often met with skepticism. Project teams frequently focus on things like deadlines or budgets and neglect the day-to-day realities of the people impacted by the change. Worse still are cases when a project team prescribes a solution rather than collaborate with end users to devise the solution. “Adoption rates drop to extremely low levels in these cases,” says Davis.

When workers become sufficiently frustrated, they may seek self-service alternatives. “When employees feel like their voices aren’t heard, they turn to familiar tools like Excel and build workarounds that get the immediate job done and IT can’t turn off,” Davis says. These spreadsheets can take on a life of their own, resulting in complex meshes of custom code, UI elements, and domain knowledge. Documentation and API support are usually nonexistent, turning these “fixes” into data silos that can be difficult to eliminate. “Integration with other software and tools used throughout the company can be really challenging in these cases, and these silos degrade the analytics functions which ultimately hurts the entire company,” says Davis.

Homegrown workarounds are also risky when it comes to business continuation. When an employee leaves, companies can find a new hire with experience using an off-the-shelf product but not one with experience using the in-house tool. Companies are increasingly likely to encounter this problem because turnover is on the rise. The average tenure of employees aged 25-44 fell to between 2.8 and 4.9 years in 2018, which doesn’t bode well for companies that rely on single points of failure. “Think about whether you want to entrust the future of a business unit to a single individual that’s going to leave in less than 3 years,” Davis says. “Most leaders aren’t comfortable with that kind of risk, for good reason.”

Homegrown workaround solutions need support, but the employees that designed them will likely be gone in less than 3 years.

Professional services and new iPaaS tech enable meaningful change

Working with Change Management professionals helps ensure initiatives succeed, but organizations don’t always understand the likelihood — and cost — of failure. Consequently, many companies try and tackle large changes on their own and wind up in the 70% that fail. The difference between success and failure, according to Davis, is all about experience. “A well-intentioned but inexperienced employee can cost you millions of dollars while they go through growing pains, learning what does and doesn’t work when deploying new tools or changes. Change Management professionals help drive that cost down dramatically.” 

Change Management is bound by the tools, infrastructure, and culture an organization has in place. “My goal is to come in and understand your processes and goals and fit a solution that best meets your needs,” says Davis. “The IT infrastructure is a crucial part of the equation. The more flexible and modern your architecture, the more creative we can be with tailoring an approach for many types of end users. Ultimately, a modern, enterprise-wide solution lets us more readily adapt to different users and business needs, while still achieving the strategic intent of the company.”

Data streaming techniques, only recently available thanks to Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) tech, provide the speed, security, and flexibility needed to maximize the likelihood that change initiatives succeed. The technology is systems agnostic, which means it can easily connect SaaS products and legacy solutions like the Excel workarounds. “It really is a game changer and opens up so many opportunities, including Machine Learning and AI,” Davis explains. “Professional services that know how to leverage this new iPaaS technology make the whole value proposition even more appealing. Like Change Management, you either invest in professionals that are true experts or risk a really very expensive learning process.”

Learn more

Ready to make your next initiative a success? Empower your change agents, and more, with cutting-edge iPaaS technology and professional services from ELJUN. We build and manage the integrations you need, ensuring you have the flexibility and scalability to drive adoption.

Visit www.eljunllc.com today and connect with an integration solutions architect to get your free, tailored plan!