The change management Informatica needed to overhaul its business model
If you take the bookends of change management, we did an excellent job up front defining the why and the what.
If you take the bookends of change management, we did an excellent job up front defining the why and the what. Then at the other end, we did a fantastic job involving the sales operations, finance, and marketing teams in the testing and design, and we did a great job training people. But we faltered a little in the middle. We didn’t communicate the change frequently enough and ask people to recommit. We should have done more of the “let’s recommit and make sure we’re all still on the same page” communication. Just because we were on the same page in January doesn’t mean we still would be in November.
In addition to ensuring people recommit to the transformation goals, what advice would you offer CIOs driving major business model transformation?
Look at changing metrics and KPIs as a gift. The metrics you use to measure a cloud company are different than those you use to measure an enterprise license and maintenance company. In the old model, for example, we didn’t talk about churn, but in the cloud, churn is one of the key metrics. Net retention rate and annual recurring revenue also became key metrics, which were new to the entire organization.
When you have a new metric, you have to do the work to agree on what the calculation is, which sounds simple, but it isn’t. Take sales territories for example. When you measure the performance of a region, and a deal is papered in North America, but the real sales work was done in Europe, is it a US or a Europe deal? As a management team, we had to make these decisions, agree to them, and write them down.
This was a gift because it forced us into data governance and we sell data governance products, so this wasn’t a new concept to us. The new metrics, though, made us define them at the most senior level in the company. The definition of ARR, for example, required debate between the CFO and the CEO, and then my team built the definition into the data warehouse. So, if you’re in sales operations, and you want to grab the ARR for a region, you’re using exactly the same number as the finance team.
The term “governance” is unfortunate because it sounds like it’s control, which it is if you’re in a heavily regulated industry. But governance, when done right, can be a business enabler. You avoid conversations around, “Where’d you get that number from? What’s the calculation? Remind me again,” which wastes time. My advice is to embrace the concept that data governance is what can allow you to go faster.
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