Miscellaneous
Welcome to Just Clarity, a periodic podcast about Digital. Just Clarity is produced by the team at Digital Clarity Group. We help leaders transform the experience they deliver to customers, prospects, and their employees through the effective selection, integration, and adoption of customer experience management technology. Learn more at digitalclaritygroup.com Cathy McKnight (CMc): In this week’s episode we'll look at the seeming lip service being given to organizational change when it comes to technology implementations. My name is Cathy McKnight and I am the VP of Consulting for Digital Clarity Group. Joining me today is Jill Finger Gibson, one of our Principal Analysts. Welcome, Jill. Jill Finger Gibson (JFG): Thanks, Cathy and good happy morning to you. So yeah the topic of organisations change, it seems to be coming up more and more interestingly at technology themed conferences and I think that most recently we both heard it when we were at the Gilbane Digital Content Conference last week where increasingly, although the discussions of what technology you choose to implement it be it a CMS or a more complicated solution, people are starting to come around to the idea that it’s more than just about the technology which is good for us right? Because that’s how Digital Clarity Group was founded is exactly thinking that and looking at the processes around in place are important. I guess one of the things I’m wondering about organization changes, how are you seeing that playing out or do you with working with our clients who are doing these kinds of projects in the end user consulting business. CMc: Yeah it’s a huge topic Jill, I mean as you know I talked about last week when we were together in Boston at Gilbane, again we’re seeing more and more coverage of it from an article and blogging perspective, but we certainly from a consulting practice perspective see it with every engagement regardless of whether we're going in and helping a company to get their roadmap for strategy together. So that early stage where they’re not quite at a technology implementation or if they call us up and we’re helping with the selection, one of the focal points for us is to make sure that they’re taking into consideration this is not about technology. When push comes to shove a major implementation whether it’s a web content management system or digital experience platform or marketing automation platform, doesn’t matter what the technology is whether it’s MarTech or beyond that, companies really have to consider what they’re getting from a technology and how that impacts their teams. What a lot of companies don’t realise and what advocate for is to not look at it as solely a technology implementation, we look at it from a four prong perspective which is technology obviously, the people and the process being two of the other factors, but also in relation as an overall umbrella to the organisational goals of why they’re actually implementing the new technology, and often when you put it in context of that, throwing in that fourth layer because you often hear about people, process, and technology, when you tie it back to the concept of, “Okay, why are we doing this?”, it really makes them stop to think about the people and the process and the other aspects of the business that the new technology will impact. JFG: Yeah, So you’ve experienced that. Do you have any sort of without naming names, an example of a project that maybe you’ve worked recently or a case study where that might have happened? CMc. Yeah, we actually did a selection for a company on the west coast earlier this year and they were very, very myopically focused on the technology. So what they wanted to engage us for was the selection of a web content management system and when I went in there and the team started asking them questions about you know, “Okay well can you show me your content strategy, can you show me your digital strategy,