Data Driven Business Transformation

Chapter 8Overall Change Management

‘The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but building the new.’

Socrates

As you can see, there is a fair amount to do to move forward in each element of the transformation process. Remember what we said at the beginning about balancing this across your organisation. Listen to the feedback and push, but push in a constructive manner than pulls people with you as well. Most importantly, as Socrates told us thousands of years ago, you need to have something worth moving towards. If Socrates, who is widely considered to be one of the founders of western philosophy, said it who are we to argue. You would also think that we might have learned to do change better in that time period but hey ho.

As a slight aside, he also said ‘the beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms (data dictionaries), know thyself (maturity assessment) let him that would move the world, first move himself (lead by example).’ We think he might have been one of the first data leaders too.

We often talk about your change journey as the internal data revolution, you want to win the hearts and minds battle throughout your company and turn everyone into data cheerleaders. However, that doesn't happen by itself, there are lots of things you can do to smooth the organisation's transition into a data‐enabled company. Change is hard, if it wasn't we would be better at it, especially since we have been talking about it for a few thousand years. ...