Integrating People with Process and Technology : Gaining Employee Acceptance of Technology Initiatives

This book contains valuable information regarding the "people" side of technology initiatives. Many companies buy the best hardware and software, and spend thousands of dollars implementing technology only to find out that the employees resist the changes, and do not fully adopt the new, and possibly, improved processes. By understanding how to manage people during change, managers will see a much quicker ROI on their technology initiatives.

CHAPTER 1: NO PEOPLE, NO BUSINESS THE NEW ECONOMY OF TECHNOLOGY

Are People Using the Technology You Bought?

The goal of any business or organization is to be profitable. Analyzing quarterly budgets to eliminate frivolous spending of valuable company dollars is a preoccupation of every C-level executive. To that end, mindful chief financial officers (CFOs) look under every stone to find a positive return on investment (ROI), especially when it comes to implementing and using technology. Dollars spent on technology are heavily scrutinized. Yet, even with all that scrutiny:

Money is frequently spent on technology without calculating the total ROI.

Technology vendors advertise the latest ROI calculators on their websites. When it comes to determining tangible costs, these calculators are very well conceived. However, once the sale is made, ROI calculations are not always used by the project team to manage the implementation. Training dollars in technology projects are often stripped from the budget because of the notion that "soft" skills are most often considered optional. The intangible or "hidden" costs associated with change are generally not considered as part of the ROI calculation. Research conducted at Purdue University by Dr. Jon Anton, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, and Lisa Schwartz indicates that technology can add money to your bottom line, but only if you know the critical elements that make the technology pay off. The research shows that three main factors people, process, and technology must be integrated to obtain an optimum ROI. Without proper integration, most companies are not reaping the full benefits of the technology:

"In a study of 100 large companies, only 52% reported achieving their business goals and only 37% could point to a tangible financial impact for technology solutions." --Boston Consulting Group

The truth about technology implementations is that although technology does what the vendor promised, ROI issues arise when change management is not figured in as part of the overall technology project budget. In cases where technology implementations include change management, the implementation becomes an exhilarating experience that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the company. When the efficiency and effectiveness of the company increase, the ROI from implementing technology can be realized fully.

The good news is that there are proven and effective ways to make your technology implementation successful. In this book we provide the critical steps that you can take to keep your organization from joining the ranks of the unsatisfied. This book will show you how to dramatically reduce employee turnover. You will also learn how to integrate the people, process, and operational technology in your contact center to provide mission-critical accessibility that increases product sales, satisfies customers, and generates revenue and profits turning the contact center into a gold mine. With agent turnover costing $6,350 per replacement (i.e., the loss of 20 agents amounts to over $127,000 per year), the people aspect of implementing technology is an area of concern that all managers need to take into account.

By reading this book you will understand:

1. The most reported technology implementation mistakes and why technology does not always deliver what it promised

2. How to dramatically reduce employee turnover and increase employee loyalty using a scientifically proven process called the "Successful People Process (SPP)"

3. How to advance your coaching skills to turn de-motivated employees into company ambassadors by reducing their Reptile Talk (negative verbalization)

4. A simple way to calculate the ROI of "soft skills" to justify training and motivational activities

5. How to integrate process and technology with people for implementations that are within budget, within scope, and on time, leading to a larger ROI on the technology investment and increased customer lifetime value that will yield larger profits and revenues

6. How to increase customer accessibility and turn the data in your contact center into easy-to-use information for executives so they can take mission-critical business actions

In our research, we found that most ROI calculations for technology do not account for two items that occur in nearly every technology implementation:

· costs of managing change

· cost of adoption resistance (people s resistance to change)

Even the most accurate ROI calculation will not help the project succeed if your staff and end-users have not been fully engaged at the beginning of a system implementation and throughout the use of the system. Having a two-million-dollar technological success may come down to whether the hourly employees choose to accurately enter customer data into the case management system. And then, that s when it hits you. Isn t this the same data that you use to make your business decisions?

In this book, we give actual, real-world examples of technology disappointments experienced by many companies. Interviewees make indirect references to the hidden costs in every example. Hidden costs are those costs that are not accounted for on the expense sheet. Because hidden costs are not usually quantifiable, management often overlooks them. Until this book, there was not a good way to demonstrate the cause and effect between the hidden costs and the ROI. And make no mistake, hidden costs do have a price. That price varies greatly with each and every project. In this book, we help teams that are implementing technology to identify the hidden costs and to control line items. We give tangible solutions to reduce risk in the form of decreased scope, time lines, and budget through improved communication.