Data Makes the World Go 'Round

Chapter 12Putting Self-service to Work in Your Company

In this chapter, we will examine the following:

• Change management approaches
• The psychology of change
• Examples for self-service and artificial intelligence (AI)

As we have seen, self-service analytics adoption (or really any kind of analytics adoption) centers around people. You can have great technology, but if people don’t buy in and are not supported, your program will fail. People have to want to use the tools, take the training, and make a change in their behavior for democratization to succeed. That can be hard, both at the individual and group level. At the individual level, people typically don’t change in a linear fashion. Think about something you tried to change about yourself and how hard it was. You may resist change for reasons that aren’t even conscious.

This chapter discusses change management and provides an overview on several approaches but focuses on two different approaches that are widely used in modern organizations. The first is the Prosci ADKAR^® Model, which focuses on changing individual behavior. It was developed by Jeff Hiatt from the Prosci group more than 20 years ago.¹ The second is the Kotter 8-step approach, which was developed by John Kotter (1996)² after observing the characteristics of organizations that could successfully change (HBR, 1995).³ I’ve also included a psychological perspective of what change entails from Joanne Heith, PsyD, a psychoanalyst, professor, and expert in group ...