| | October 20148CIOReviewBe Change Ready in an Evolving Manufacturing VerticalFired...unemployed! And just four short years into your tenure as CIO of a three-billion dollar, global manufacturing company. You thought you did everything right? You've been reading CIO Review regularly and you followed many recommendations from your peers. You implemented many key systems with catchy acronyms MES, PLM, CRM, EDW. You even deployed most of those systems in the cloud. You killed Office and pushed everyone to Google Docs. You gave the sales team tablets to interface with the CRM. You embraced BYOD and you hired an enterprise architect from MIT. What the heck else could you have done!Let's do a post-mortem and then I'll explain why this hits close to home for me. At first glance, the CRM usage rate was abysmal. It turns out the sales team didn't think the CRM software made their jobs easier so they've been using emails and spreadsheets to track leads rendering the new system virtually useless. Mobile devices were liberally deployed. However it seems some supervisors on the manufacturing line started chatting with their friends on social media websites. Inadvertently their posts released trade secrets to the interwebs for all to see. Finally you probably should have clued in when that brick came through your window after you killed Microsoft Excel and moved everyone to Google Docs, but you were on a mission. Here's the real problem--buy-in from the key stakeholders was overlooked. No one was convinced as to why all of these recent changes were necessary. The result is another warm body for the unemployment line. Okay, the story above is a little dramatic, but is it really that outlandish? In fact the CRM portion of the story is pretty close to reality for me and my company. I knew that the CRM was a big shift for our sales team on many levels, heck I even told the implementation team to "focus on the culture shift." But in the end IT went to its comfort zone of technical implementation and data loads. We "let the business handle the change management." I saw it happening right before my eyes, like a slow motion car wreck. Not my best move... now, we're correcting our mistakes with the CRM. We've already undone most of the harm, but we could have done so much better.As CIOs, especially in the margin-focused manufacturing sector, most of us struggle mightily to keep our stretched resources motivated. Many of us have a staff that is inexperienced in change management and run from the word By Matt Mizell, CIO, Lairdopinionin myMatt Mizell
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