AI, Data & Measurement and the CMO

Don’t we all take comfort in objective decision making? Decision making that goes beyond vague guesses or subjective opinions that gain greatest traction by virtue of who has the ear of those in the driving seat.

We expect objectivity from our finance functions, our enterprise risk and performance measurement functions, so too our project management offices. So why should change management, in particular the change management office, be any different? As an enterprise capability, the CMO is in danger of falling short compared to our comparative functions.  

There are many aspects to consider in closing this gap.

To close it, we should ask ourselves what are the CMO pain points we need to address, what reliable data sources are already available and, if not, how would we develop the necessary data sets to apply advanced, or even basic, analytical techniques?

Help combat negative cumulative change impacts

“The CMO’s mission becomes one of standardizing change impacts data, with common rubrics and calibrated interpretation of such assessments.”

For many CMOs, their starting point is supporting their Executive in tackling the negative business performance implications caused by cumulative change impacts. In nearly any situation, the CMO needs an apples-to-apples comparison across data sets. Anything other than a centralized change capability, or robust change data governance model, can add to the complication in having comparative data. Therefore, the CMO’s mission becomes one of standardizing change impacts data, with common rubrics and calibrated interpretation of such assessments. This focus might also extend to considering cumulative change readiness, enabling an Executive team to determine, at the aggregated level, how well prepared their workforce is to change.  

Other change management aspects that may come under the lens of measurement include assessing the effectiveness of the change work or tactics used, thereby assessing the performance of Change Management in itself. Without a clear relationship to the desired business outcomes and a sufficiently close causal link, these measures can be little more than activity or volume-based accounting approaches.  

Looking beyond these early steps in maturity, CMOs have rich opportunities ahead of them. A CMO’s elevator pitch would be surprisingly lacking if it did not include reference to maximizing change adoption and therefore business ROI.

Enhance your competitive advantage

While supporting people through change from a welfare perspective is admirable, it belies the importance of effective change management being applied as a critical competitive advantage. Those organizations that value it, and therefore leverage it best, see it enabling them to out change the competition and being better than the competition at adopting change to achieve competitive advantage.

To this end, CMOs are wise to examine such questions as:

• How well are we informing our Executive in their strategic planning and where to place their strategic bets?
• Are we able to help our Executive determine how quickly we can change?
• Can we inform them reliably about, or even predict the likelihood of, change risks?
• Can we assist our Executive in determining if the risk of changing is too great without modelling alternative courses of action to mitigate the risk?
• Can we reliably track enterprise change capacity and inform the Executive as to how much change they can introduce and the consequences for change adoption?
• Do we have a robust approach to reporting change adoption that clearly links to the business outcomes and return on investment?

The broader application of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will only enhance CMOs abilities to derive sound objective insights from large complex data sets and provide strategic insights to furnish their Executive teams with the best possible advise when making pivotal strategic decisions.  

As advancements are made in other related professions in the business performance enablement arena, the CMOs that continue to be unable to address such questions risk losing relevance with their Executive, and therefore the reason for their on-going funding. It is all too easy to put-off the work required to get a CMOs change data warehouse in order, however that is only hastening its demise.  

*This article has been created to accompany a Round Table discussion moderated by Nick Freeman on AI, Data & Measurement,  held on the 10th of December 2020.

**UPDATE: If you would like a copy of the post discussion write up please contact amber.madden@issoriachange.com

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