The Location Aware Enterprise and the Need for Organizational Change Management

Ed.Note: This article is the third in a series being written by consultants on Booz Allen Hamilton and published by Directions Magazine on the topic of "The Location Aware Enterprise." Follow these links if you missed the first two.

The Location Aware Enterprise: An Integrating Business Principle
The Location Aware Enterprise: Foundation For Efficient Operations and Emergency Response

The U.S.Department of Labor has stated that, "The Geospatial Technology Industry is an emerging high growth sector of the U.S.economy that is expected to reach more than $21 billion in revenue over the next few years." Other estimates of the geospatial industry, while varied in their revenue ranges, all agree that it is a growth element of the worldwide economy.A simplified view of the geospatial industry can be segmented into software, hardware, data products and services, with combinations of each accounting for different percentages of these revenue projections.Although an expected increase in location-based services within the consumer market space will account for a large portion of the growth in that revenue base, continued growth across the geospatial industry segments and the clients they serve, will result in challenges and opportunities for both industry and clients.

In our second article, the value of a "Location Aware" enterprise was demonstrated by New York City during the 9/11 tragedy.Through spatially enabled enterprise data integration, the departments within the City and those organizations that supported the response and recovery operations were able to share key information on city services between themselves and with the public.Given the outlook on the geospatial technologies industry and experiences such as New York City's, whether an organization expands its departmental structure or chooses to pursue a location aware enterprise-wide integration, it will face the challenges (and opportunities) of expanding its geospatial services.The challenge of leveraging new geospatial services in an enterprise-wide system can benefit an organization's Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management and Business Intelligence.As a result of implementing expanded or new geospatial services, organizational design and change management challenges must be addressed.In particular, the enterprise implementation of geospatial services will require an approach that creates an understanding of the benefits of using new geospatial technologies throughout the organization and across stakeholder groups. To successfully implement change, this approach must address human capital, communications, training and program/performance management as levers for change.
Booz Allen has developed the Transformation Life Cycle (TLC) framework to successfully transform organizations and sustain change through rigorous performance management and continuous improvement.Our approach has three key elements at its foundation: Capability Development, Ownership Building, and Program Stewardship. These three elements are interdependent and critical to successful change.

Capability Development
An organization's implementation of an enterprise architecture (with or without geospatial functionality) will result in the need for new and different capabilities than those that exist in the organization today. To identify those needs, an organization should:

Baseline the current state capabilities at the enterprise level
Identify future-state capability requirements
Analyze the gap between current and future state
Develop a program-wide capabilities model
Develop a conceptual solutions design (i.e., training and Human Capital strategies) that includes "first steps" to build momentum for change through early results.

Ownership Building
In order to build a sense of ownership and commitment among key stakeholders within the organization, the leadership must enlist the support of key stakeholders through targeted, frequent communication and involvement.This is best done through a Communications Plan, which is a well thought out approach for providing reports, briefings, and other communications to stakeholders.By building ownership early on, the ability to leverage key leaders as champions in support of systemic changes arising out of an enterprise implementation will foster collaboration.A stakeholder assessment can serve as a foundation for development of a Change Plan.The Change Plan should address change initiatives and interventions that are designed to build understanding and acceptance of the change throughout the organization and across stakeholder groups.

Program Stewardship
Organizations choosing to implement an enterprise architecture recognize the need to establish a coordination function to provide leadership across those operations, systems, and programs affected by the enterprise integration as well as those that will directly or indirectly benefit from its implementation.This group of leaders will play an important role in creating collaboration across the organization and its departments.While many organizations choose to have this function as an 'add-on' to the leadership's existing responsibilities or as a short-term assignment, Booz Allen maintains that the organization would benefit from standing up a dedicated, more tactical Program Management Office (PMO) to manage the change process on a day-to-day basis.Such an office will provide focus for:

Developing a transformation strategy to support the organization's future vision
Developing a more tactical transformation roadmap
Developing the business case for change, including performance measures
Developing and driving an implementation plan.

The PMO would work with the organization impacted by the enterprise implementation to leverage proven program management approaches, enabled through effective processes and tools that will enable the organization to set goals and performance measures against the Change Plan, document performance, and track against goals and measures and communicate results to the organization's leadership and other key stakeholders.Experience shows that an effective PMO using defined performance measures is a key to driving successful change.

Benefits of Approach
This transformation approach, one that has been proven through years of successful change programs, offers the following benefits:

An iterative approach that addresses key change levers early on
Actively managed Communications and Change Management Plans resulting in increased buy-in and commitment of leadership and other key stakeholders and focus on moving the change forward
Identification of skills and capability gaps and solutions for closing those gaps
A roadmap for change that results in early wins, yet guides the effort through implementation
Development of performance focused Program Management Office that drives results.

Change, the Only Constant
If the indications are correct and the geospatial technology industry experiences the exponential growth predicted, organizations will be challenged to meet the opportunity.The success of such a transformation is enhanced by a variety of change management and organization design practices.Applying a proven, well though tout approach to change management, such as Booz Allen's Transformation Life Cycle can contribute to the successful implementation of any organizations' strategy to meet the challenge of change.Given the outlook for the geospatial technologies industry, which reflects the expected wide-spread use and integration of these technologies in business and government applications, Booz Allen expects change management services to become increasingly important to assuring organizations effectively leverage the capabilities inherent in the growth of the industry.