Change = WIIFM > WMETP

May 08, 2013 by Jim Harris

My previous post about change management, which advocated nudges not mandates, received an excellent comment from Karen Way: “What I’ve found that works to nudge people into accepting data quality as part of their norm is to demonstrate the benefit to them, the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) factor. This is especially true…

Don’t Mess with Data

Apr 03, 2013 by Jim Harris

In Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein recounted the story of the campaign to reduce littering on Texas highways called Don’t Mess with Texas.  Prior to launching it, Texas officials were enormously frustrated by the failure of their previous, well-funded, and highly publicized advertising campaigns, which attempted to convince people that it was their civic duty to stop littering.

Loss Aversion and Change Management

Nov 28, 2012 by Jim Harris

Commenting on my post An Unsettling Truth about Data Governance, Ken O’Connor shared a great quote by Ronald Heifetz:

“People do not fear change, they fear loss.”

This quote reminded me of loss aversion, which is a term from behavioral economics for a cognitive bias where people are more affected by a potential loss than they are by a gain of equal value.

An Unsettling Truth about Data Governance

Nov 07, 2012 by Jim Harris

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” I’m certain Ralph Waldo Emerson wasn’t describing the disruptive nature of data governance when he wrote those words. Nonetheless, his words are an apt way to describe the change-adoptive culture that must be embraced for data governance to be successful.

“What is is the was of what shall be”

Sep 28, 2011 by Jim Harris

Two of the many things that I am looking forward to at next week’s DataFlux IDEAS 2011 conference is seeing the new book Tales from the Data Roundtable and participating in the Data Roundtable panel with David Loshin, Joyce Norris-Montanari, Rich Murnane, and Phil Simon.  The panel will be moderated by Jill Dyché and the topic of discussion will be Predictions and Trends for 2012.

What if?

Jun 09, 2011 by Phil Simon

Large, multinational organizations typically struggle managing their data. This isn’t news to anyone who has worked more than a few months inside of the typical corporate environs. Nor should the following shock you: the vast majority of data cleanup and management initiatives still tend to start at the top and cascade downward. Lamentably, something typically gets lost in translation at each “hand-off,” especially when people only hear and do what they want to hear and do.

Necessity is the Mother of (Not Only Good) Invention

Apr 20, 2011 by Jim Harris

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” Although no one can say for certain who first said or wrote these words, some version of this proverb has existed for centuries within cultures and languages all around the world.

Retrograde Organizational Motion

Apr 13, 2011 by Jim Harris

Enterprise initiatives such as data governance, master data management and data quality all face a common challenge: they require your organization to take on a significant and sustained change management effort. Despite being the most common phenomenon in the universe, change is almost universally resisted, making most of us act as if change is anything but common. We all get complacent with the way things are, and it is always easier to stay the current course than it is start moving in a new direction.