No small change

Paul Gaffney, CIO at Staples Inc. and an Enterprise Value Awards judge, sums up the monumental task the CPD faced: "I can't imagine a more difficult change environment than an organization like a very old police department. You have longtime employees. They're used to doing things a particular way. They succeeded in not only delivering the right technology but also embracing that technology and unlocking all the value."

Selling the system

Though it might not be as dramatic as cops switching from ballpoints to bits, Procter & Gamble still had plenty of user resistance as it rolled out its Corporate Standards System (CSS). CSS is a global, centralized application that manages the company's technical standards around each product. Technical standards are a critical component of the company's product lifecycle management process -- they are the communications links that connect everything from R&D to the product supply department for the purchase, manufacture, storage and shipping of materials and products. The beauty care group, for example, has an average of 125 standards for such key information as formulas, regulatory clearances and packaging instructions, and each project identification code or SKU (overall, the company has about 55,000 SKUs in current production). CSS allows the reuse of existing tech standards and lets its more than 8,200 users share data across the globe. (Previously, people had squirreled away that info in any number of places, including three-ring binders, the occasional website and some electronic workflow tools.)

When working on the development of P&G's CSS system, John Planalp, associate director for corporate R&D, wanted input from business units that were grappling with a lot of complexity. In P&G's case, that meant studying the needs of Western Europe, which contains a number of different countries, languages, brands, country-of-sale agreements and artwork. He says that he wanted to make sure the tool could handle such a wide variety of inputs, without designing it in such a way that users in a simple business -- say, a brand of kitchen towel in a country with a single language -- would struggle with it, or worse, not use it.

The main objective of P&G's project leaders was to show employees how CSS would improve their workflow. They did Web-based training and set up a help desk that follows up on every request from employees. In describing the rollout, Planalp and other execs like to talk about a 60-day immune response from users. That's about how much time it took for employees to get over their resistance to the new system. After that, says Dan R. Blair, director of worldwide technical standards and the business sponsor of the project, they often became advocates. When people complained about the system being too slow, for instance, employees discovered it usually wasn't the technology but the work process that was the culprit. For example, someone in R&D may have been used to documenting last-minute change requests from a retailer (such as a request from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to change the products on a pallet) on the back of envelope. At first they found that documenting changes in CSS demanded more rigor and was thus more frustrating. After fixing the work process -- by, for instance, standardizing the approvals necessary for late change requests -- they found that the system made their life easier. "Eighty percent of the time it's not about the tool, it's about the work process," says Planalp.

Executives at Guardian Life Insurance had a similar change management challenge when they rolled out a new insurance and annuity policy administration system dubbed Transcend. The system, which replaced an aging legacy system, enables real-time automated annuity policy processing and allows Guardian to connect to third-party broker dealers and build relationships with the brokers and their customer base. According to Executive Vice President and CIO Dennis Callahan, Transcend was successfully deployed with little resistance from internal users. IT executives created the usual menu of workshops and training sessions for users when the new system was launched. But the key, Callahan says, was the partnership between business and IS -- there's no battle between the CIO and any business head for control of the agenda. "People are getting the same message from the top down. That eliminates the tension and simplifies change," he says.