"Because people hate change" and why change management is so frustrating

I was researching an article on why kicking off a capture or ECM project is so challenging, and I got to talking with one of my friends who is an IT analyst with the state of California. His name has been omitted but I swear on my iPhone this is true. Here is the exact chat we had this morning on why change management is so hard. See if you relate.

“I’m working on an article about replacing legacy systems and processes, any advice from the trenches?” I asked. He replied quickly “People hate change. End of article.” I laughed and took stock of his brutally honest response.

He continued at a rapid pace, “I'm hoping that fear of change lessons as a younger generation becomes a larger part of the Information Systems world. We're also the generation that won't accept crappy software on the basis that ‘it's been working for ten years, why change it?’ The state is full of bloated, cryptic, barely functioning proprietary software that's never been replaced because nobody is willing to put in the effort. And why change things when you're retiring in 5-8 years? So we have whole groups of people devoted to maintaining ancient main frame databases. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Clearly, this is universal not just to capture, or ECM, or really any software, but to technology as a whole. There is a huge generational shift as people from Generation Y (like me) enter the work force. We expect different things, and more accountability. We continued to chat about the day to day life of change management.

“For the last 6 months I've been working on replacing our ancient system. During the process I have to figure out how everything works, which is nearly impossible. People aren't willing to tell me what they actually do every day. My guess is because they do very little and know that everything they do could be automated if the system wasn't 25 years old.”

So what does this all mean? Clearly, many of you will identify with this situation either in your own organization, or with customers that you work with. As early adopters we have to demand more from ourselves, our teams, and our organizations to not be complacent with the status quo of IT and ECM. Broken systems and broken processes are just a problem waiting for a solution! My advice would be to start with small projects and achievable goals, and use the momentum to tackle larger problems.

What do you think? Is your organization resistant to change? Do you identify with my friends comments? Please let me know in the comments, or send a tweet or homing pigeon.

World Paper Free Day is October 28th

When it comes to “going paperless”, it’s not something that you can do overnight. You didn’t create all of your paper or manual processes that rely on them in a day, and you won’t break your paper habit cold turkey.

As many of you know, AIIM is hosting a global event to educate people on the benefits of going truly paperless. As a shameless plug, I’ll be speaking at the Los Angeles event on the benefits and use cases for electronic forms. We also have speakers on scanning, shredding, and digital signatures; all critical components of going paperless. In my opinion, electronic forms are the most important piece of the puzzle, since over 85% of business processes depend on forms, and almost all of them are on paper.

If you would like to participate in one of these events in your area, sign up at http://www.aiim.org/events/paper-free-day . Alternatively if you live in a cave or in an area without a local event, please join us on Twitter next week for a virtual meeting of the minds to share ideas. Full details are posted at http://aiimcommunities.org/capture/blog/paperfree-day-tweet-jam-share-ideas .  We’ll be furiously tweeting on October 21 from 11-12:30 EST under the hash tag #wpfd .

On behalf of the entire AIIM Community, I hope you can participate in this event, and I look forward to learning more from YOU (yes you reading this right now) on making the world paperless.

What would you tell yourself if you could go back in time before the project started?

Imagine that I have a time traveling DeLorean that can magically whisk you back in time to before you started your capture project. I know, you aren’t supposed to take rides from strangers, but let’s make an exception.

We’ve all heard the phrase that hindsight is 20/20, and while time machines don’t actually exist, we can still share some of the things we wish we had known before the process began. 

Here are my top 5 tips that you probably wish you knew before you started your capture project.

1.       Legacy document conversion plan

It didn’t take you a day to make a ton of paper, and it won’t all be scanned and indexed overnight. Have a plan to prioritize and determine what should be scanned, and what should just sit in a box or file cabinet until destruction.

2.       Create a scope of work

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail! So make sure you engage all the stakeholders, including Bob from accounting. Set simple goals, diagram some basic capture workflows, and set milestones for what you want to accomplish. Oh and don’t forget training both initially, and ongoing.

3.       Change management

Your team already has a way of capturing and storing information manually, and you have to understand that they have a comfort level with the process. To be really successful with your capture initiatives, you have to break the project into bite-size milestones that are easy to meet without scaring your end users. If you are an end user, encourage the project manager to make changes gradually.

4.       Choice of vendor

Don’t believe everything a vendor tells you. Write this down, place it on a plaque in your office. I’d recommend taking a “trust but verify” approach, and don’t be afraid to ask for things like site visits with other customers, and a proof of concept for your own organization. In these economic times, they are willing to bend over to earn your business, so you might as well take advantage of it.

5.       Indexing

How you index a document is critical, because it determines how you will find the data it contains in the future. If capture to you still means paper, consider your options for OCR and ICR, and come up with some basic templates to store the important information. If possible, think about replacing paper capture processes with things like electronic forms. That way, you can capture information without having to scan or manually process things.

So internet, if you had a time machine and could go back before YOUR project began -what would you tell yourself and your team? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments.