A Holistic Approach to Accelerating Adoption

Alec O'Dell:

Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to today's CMSWire webinar. As always, I'm Alec. I'm here today to help answer any general or technical questions that come up, but before we get started, I'd like to take some time and thank you all for joining us for A Holistic Approach to Accelerating Adoption. So thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules and joining us. Here's a loose overview of the timings of the presentation here. These can change, so don't hold me to these. At any point during today's presentation, if you have a question, please do not hesitate to click on the Ask a Question tab below our webcams right now. Type your question in and click submit. If it's content related, we'll have some time for questions that we'll save towards the end, so we'll be keeping track of those here in the background. So again, don't hesitate to submit those.

If it's a technical question, and hopefully we don't need this, but if you run into any tech issues, please submit the tech issue that you're facing in the Ask a Question tab so I can work with you directly to get those issues resolved. So the question tab should not be confused with the chat tab. I know they're right next to each other, that can be a little confusing, but the chat tab is where you can chat with your fellow attendees about the content today and let us know where you're joining from. I am on the outskirts of the Chicago suburbs today, so let me know where you're joining from. A lot of times it is from around the world and I'd like to see that. So feel free to jump into that chat and chat about today's content.

Here's a little bit about CMSWire. If you're here, you probably know who we are, but if you're new, welcome and thanks for joining us. We were funded in 2003, we cover three primary topic areas, the digital customer experience, digital workplace, and information management. You can find out more about us at cmswire.com, where you can read some of our content, register for more upcoming webinars like today's, and then you can register to attend our in-person conference coming up in Austin, Texas, May 10th through the 12th. So we're co-locating with our sister publication, Reworked, so we got a great event in the works for you all. You can find out more about that at cmswire.com/connect.
I'm very happy to be joined by today's sponsors who made this webinar possible, and that is Elastic Path. Elastic Path powers mission critical digital commerce for the world's leading brands such as Intuit, Pella, Deckers Brands, T-Mobile, and over 250 other leading enterprises. As relentless innovators, Elastic Path pioneered the headless commerce space in 2011 and spearheaded Composable Commerce in 2020. So it's been a pleasure working with the team as we prepared for this event over the course of the past couple months, so you can find out more about Elastic Path at elasticpath.com.

All right. I have two guests on the screen here that you can see with me, and I'm going to pass the ball over to them here shortly, but we have Abisola Adeyemo, a product marketing manager with Elastic Path, and Matthew Schaeffer, the senior manager of Data and Content Operations at REI. So first things first, we're going to hear from Abisola to get us started and tell us a little bit about Elastic Path, and then we'll get into some content from Matthew. So Abisola, over to you.

Abisola Adeyemo:

Thank you. So I'm going to share a little bit about Elastic Path and just the importance of embracing a composable architecture for e-commerce. So Elastic Path, we are an API-first, composable e-commerce platform, and we provide game-changing composable products and services for brands with complexity. So these brands have multi geos, multi-business models, and multi-brands. And we support them with products that help them to create these differentiated, unique product-centric experiences that drive revenue and conversion.

And we do that with sort of three pillars, one being merchandising complex catalogs. So our products allow brands, especially business teams and merchandisers, to create these dynamic product experiences across every route to market and merchandising strategy. We also deliver on the promise of composable commerce. So we understand that embracing a composable commerce approach can be daunting, and so we provide products that support with the implementation with things like no-code integrations and our composable front-end solutions, so that brands are able to launch faster and focus more on creating those innovative commerce experiences versus implementation.

And last but not least, we serve as a trusted ally and expert. So we really want to support brands when it comes to de-risking composable commerce, and we do that with our dedicated customer success team and multi-vendor support. So why does this even matter? So as you all probably know, the digital business and digital commerce requirements are becoming increasingly complex, but the current monolithic legacy platforms for commerce are obsolete. And we know that when brands have these generic older commerce experiences and those customer experiences that are not very modern, they're losing out. And there's actually studies that show that brands who improve customer experiences increase revenue by 15% and lower costs by 20%.

And we also know that consumer expectations are increasingly growing, and so are your team's needs. So in this modern market, you need to be able to meet the demands for your customers and create those compelling product experiences. You need to meet the demands of your board and your merchandising team, empowering them to be able to launch and optimize without heavy IT reliance. And you need to be able to support your engineering team with providing them with innovative technology. So we also, as I mentioned before, the legacy commerce platforms result in poor customer experiences. And so when you have a legacy platform, you're really leaving money on the table because it leads to reduced impulse buy, and cart sizes, and increase abandoned sessions, and lowers the sale of bundled goods.

And another report shows that 73% of brands actually leave after three or fewer negative experiences, so it's so important to make sure that your commerce platform is up-to-date and modern. So Elastic Path, we work with so many different brands and one of our favorites is Pella Windows. And so when Pella Windows came to us, they had a very complex use case, so they actually do not have any SKUs, so all of their products are SKU-less, and actually their customers are able to configure their products to create the SKUs. And so that level of customization would not be able to be supported with a traditional commerce platform. And they also had super complex, unique cart configurations that they needed and they wanted to innovate with different channels.

So they wanted to start off with D2C, then go to B2B, and then go to apps. So they just had a lot of complexity. And so when we worked with them, we were able to support their complex product configurations and we helped them launch into new touchpoints. And we also just allowed their merchandising strategy to be modern and up to date. So it's just been really beautiful to see the work that we've been able to do with Pella.

Another brand that we've worked with is Konica Minolta. So they also had a very complex merchandising strategy and their business was actually evolving, going from selling products to selling services, and they needed a platform to support that. They also had an extremely vast product catalog and hundreds of B2B accounts. So they needed, again, a platform to support that. And they also have multi-geos and multi-brands, so they needed a platform that was going to be GDPR compliant. And so when they worked with us, we were able to make sure that we supported all of their roadmaps requirements like we mentioned before, and we were able to help them with a lot of their merchandising strategies, those complex merchandising strategies such as dynamic bundles and account-specific catalogs. And they were able to do that within one single instance. And Elastic Path is GDPR and PCI ready, so we were able to support their compliance as well.

So these are just a few examples of just how important it is to adopt a modern architecture and modern technology to support brands like these with a lot of complexity, and at Elastic Path we are built for those complex brands. So that's all I have for today. Thank you all so much. I'm going to take it back to Matthew.

Matthew Schaeffer:

Hi, thank you. My name is Matthew Schaeffer and I am thrilled to be here with you today to talk about A Holistic Approach to Accelerating Adoption. I'm going to start by just talking a little bit about who I am and why I am so looking forward to discussing this with you. As Alec mentioned, I'm a senior manager, I support a suite of programs that's known as the data and content operations team. And at a really high level, what we do is figure out how we get data from backend systems and from systems that are bringing data into our broader data ecosystem and figure out what we need to do to that data to standardize it and clean it up and then push it through so it can be used in front-end, customer-facing experiences.

And as we play that role, we are central players and stakeholders in an ongoing digital transformation that we've been working on at REI to modernize our platforms and set us up to deliver next-generation experiences. Really, our North Star is personalized customer experiences across channels and at scale. If you're not familiar with REI, we're an outdoor retailer or we're best known for the gear we sell, but we do a whole lot of other things. We've got a ton of cool content, we have really amazing trips and classes, we do rentals, we do use. So we really try to become something of a one-stop shop for people that are trying to get outdoors.

I've been at REI for about seven years. It's the longest I've ever worked anywhere, which I think speaks to REI. Previously, my background was in journalism. I started out in Romania as a journalist and editor, I worked at Forbes, The New York Post, I worked at a futurist think tank, I worked at an online publication known as FLYP, which the day that we found out we were nominated for a Webby, we also found out we had lost our funding, which I think might encapsulate the startup experience for a lot of people. And then I was at Microsoft for a number of years working on MSN News. A few other tidbits about me, I love to travel, I've been at 25 or so countries.

Along with working, I really try to balance my life with snowboarding and surfing. I try to do those things 50-plus days a year, roughly once a week. And if people are podcast fans, I really can't recommend The Knowledge Project and The Rich Roll Podcasts. And on the right, there's a picture of me and my wife and my two kitties, one of which is giving me a leg rubs as we speak, and hopefully she will let me focus a little bit. So that's a little bit about me.

And then as for what we're going to discuss today, the agenda is I want to start a little bit and talk about why accelerating adoption matters, get into reasons that adoption efforts fail and reasons that they succeed, talk about this mental model of technical versus adaptive challenges, get into the change management and talk about some of the basics of change management, and then take a step back and look at what a holistic adoption plan looks like.
I'm going to start off with three definitions just to ground us all so that we're all talking about similar things. The first one is digital transformation, which is often synonymous with this idea of modernization. And what this means to me is harnessing technology to change the way you do business. This is a big topic for a lot of companies right now, and we see this all over the place. One example of digital transformation is the shift from say, analog cameras to digital cameras, where analog cameras were doing great for a long time, digital came in and now all those analog camera companies really need to figure out what's a new business model or a new approach because it's hard to find a film developer or a darkroom or any of those things anymore.

And I think that's a good example of how impactful these sorts of things can be. Digital adoption, I define it as attaining a state where an individual is able to use a system, application, software, or tool to its fullest capacity. And that's what we're essentially going to unpack today. What does it look like to put your users, the people that are working in your systems and your tools, how do you set them up for success? And then user adoption is the process of successfully introducing new technology into your company and ensuring employees are using it.

So with that said, the first thing I want to talk a little bit about is why adoption and digital transformations are so important and why success with these is so important. Primarily, it's because most of these efforts fail to meet their objectives. There are a lot of numbers out there, but roughly 70% of companies that undergo these digital transformations don't achieve the results that they were looking for, that they were going after. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but at a meta level, the challenge is really you're trying to do these fundamental changes across these large and complex companies and organizations, but you're typically also trying to balance that with short-term pressures.

And so in my experience, a lot of the time, those short-term pressures have the most immediate impacts and results, and we often mortgage these long-term efforts to support these short-term needs, and it becomes this challenging dynamic to balance over time. But another reason that these are so important is that successful transformations really set companies up for success. One of the tenants of a successful transformation and successful adoption is that you build in this concept of continuous innovation and iterative improvement. And so ideally, if you can succeed in these transformations, it's something you have to do once and then you just continue to improve more incrementally from there on.

So why do adoption efforts fail? There are a ton of reasons why these fail, and one of the really challenging parts of this is really any of these failures can undermine your overall success. And so these things can include underestimating the disruptive impact of digital adoption, driving adoption in a silo, not investing in the full scope of technology that's needed to modernize. I personally have dealt with this one. At REI, we have been for the last couple years investing a lot of money on this next-generation customer data platform so that we can better aggregate data from our customers and better understand their needs and their wants, but we weren't funding the content side of that. And as our big goal is personalization, we had kind of half of the equation there. And so we had to go back and really figure out how do we go from funding this one area that's very important to funding this broader area because it was this entire system that was needed to deliver on our objectives.

One of the other really big challenging reasons that efforts fail is company culture and employee resistance, including holding on the legacy systems. I'll talk a little bit more about that. Other failures or other reasons for failure include lack of support from the leadership team, a lack of collaboration between teams, lack of consistent communication about progress, results and challenges, lack of investments in training or acquisition, or in the skillsets needed to operate new tools and systems, a lack of understanding of the operational changes that are needed, and a misalignment between acquiring technology, so buying technology and actually adopting those technologies and having them support your business objectives.

This is a quote that I think does a really good job of summarizing the challenges inherent in digital transformation and adoption efforts. And it reads, "There is a high hidden cost to legacy culture thinking. Over time, the systems that did work well will begin to underperform as the market and your competitors embrace new technology. Waiting until the current way you do things to stop working before you embrace new technological advances is how you fall out of touch with the market." And I think that's what a lot of companies are seeing. You see companies like Amazon come in with this really disruptive and innovative approach where they're building all these new capabilities, and those things start to become the industry standard and customers start to expect those things, so the other companies in the e-commerce space that aren't keeping up with a lot of those capabilities and features start to fall behind and start to realize that their systems and their technology isn't going to meet the demands going forward.

So that was a lot of negatives, so let's talk a little bit about why adoption efforts succeed. I admit this list is a little bit shorter, but four kind of key tenets for success are having a comprehensive change management plan, which I will get into more, effective trading and ongoing support for your internal users, improved experiences for the technology users, so the people that are working in these systems that are using these platforms really need to see how it's better for them and understand the value of using these new systems. And finally, tangible results for the business. You need to be able to show the value on what you're doing. And as opposed to why the adoption efforts fail where any one or a handful of those can lead to an overall failure, you really need all of these things to succeed, which is why it's really important to have this more holistic approach to adoption.

And so maybe the biggest challenge in this is that implementing technology isn't the hurdle, it isn't the biggest obstacle typically, especially in my experience. The real challenge is changing the minds and behaviors of the people that are working in the system and the leadership that is essentially funding and approving these sorts of changes. It's one thing to convince an executive to fund your solution, but it's a much different challenge to implement your tool or solution and have that implementation stick. The technology, again, is important, but the people dimension, the organization, the operating model, the processes and the culture is usually the determining factor in success or failure. And organizational inertia from deeply rooted behaviors is a big impediment to change.

And so all of these things are why I am advocating for a holistic approach to adoption and digital transformation. It's a little bit contradictory because these holistic efforts take time and effort, and if you're trying to accelerate adoption, it sometimes becomes hard to wrap your mind around the idea that you need to put so many different mechanisms in place to succeed, but the reality is if you don't do that, you're likely not going to succeed. And that is really what is going to be the biggest impediment to success.

So as we delve a little more deeply into this holistic plan, I want to talk about a mental model that I find to be exceedingly helpful when thinking about the sorts of problems that you deal with in these situations, and that is technical problems versus adaptive challenges. So to illustrate the difference there on the left are some examples of technical problems, and on the right are some examples of adaptive challenges. So technical problems include things like building a house, cooking a meal, writing a project plan, and losing weight. And I think the common theme of all these things is there's an established way to do these things.

Building a house, you have a blueprint, you have kind of established builders, framers and plumbers that come in and kind of do the work and there's a standardized, consistent way to do these things. Same with cooking a meal, most meals have recipes that you can follow. Writing a project plan, you often have templates. Losing weight, you can go to Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or read about a keto diet and have kind of a methodology available to you.
Adaptive challenges are a whole different ballgame. These include things like parenting children, beating the competition. This one, this next one is relevant for REI, changing how people experience the outdoors, and again, losing weight. And when I sent this presentation out for a pre-read, I was asked if this was a typo because losing weight was in both categories, but in this case it's not. The difference, the way I see this being different is losing weight can be a technical problem where you can employ a sub-methodology, but at a metal level when you think about it, you might have to try different things and figure out what works for you and maybe you try Weight Watchers and it doesn't work, but then you figure out that, "Oh wait, this keto diet really works well for me." And you kind of figure out as you go, what works for you and what doesn't, and essentially assemble your own mechanism for losing weight.
This is a screenshot from a game known as Civilization, and I included it in here because it's this mental image I get that I think does a good job of illustrating adaptive challenges. When you play this game, you kind of start in these areas, and you can see these hexagons here, you can only see the areas around you, but as you walk around, those dark areas start to come into focus and you start to understand the detail and start to understand what exists in these other areas. And for whatever reason that really resonates for me when I think about these challenges because at a really high level, I think the way you could talk about it after challenges is you know to some extent where you are, you have a good idea where you want to go, but you don't know how you're going to get there necessarily. And so you have to figure it out.

And you generally don't have all the information you need, so it consists of a process of trial and error. And I think the critical key to success in that is embracing ambiguity and embracing the fact that you don't know everything you need to know to get where you're trying to go.

And why I think this is so exceedingly relevant is because adaptive challenges are really what these holistic adoption efforts are all about. And here are some specific examples or specific definitions of the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges. For technical problems, problems and solutions are understood and agreed upon. For adaptive challenges, the problem is unclear or disputed, and the solution is unknown. For technical problems, they maintain current ways of working, whereas adaptive challenges demand new ways of working. Technical problems extend and refine past practices and existing practices, whereas adaptive challenges change or end past practices and require new practices. And finally, technical problems can be addressed using current skills, knowledge, and ways of working, whereas adaptive challenges require new skills, insights, and ways of working. And I think this just does a really good job of explaining and defining the types of problems and the approach for those problems that you're going to have as you undergo these sorts of adoption efforts.

So a few tips and techniques that can help adoption efforts succeed. Again, I did a lot of research into this. Some of this comes from personal experiences, but these are some things that came up again and again. You can build in a buffer to account for loss productivity during implementation, things are going to slow down during implementation, you might have to sacrifice some of those short-term gains and you need to acknowledge that and prepare for that. You can create short-term goals to break your adoption plan into achievable steps, you can link employee performance goals to transformation success, you can create visible ways to celebrate successes and manage morale, you should start small and focus initial efforts on delivering a discrete set of prioritized use cases, and you can define a simple clear set of critical metrics of progress towards your desired outcomes, so you can actually measure how well you are tracking towards your broader objectives.

And I think all of these are important, and there are two things about these that I think are important to note as well. One is that you need to do all of these things to succeed. And I think one of the challenges that a lot of companies that are working on adoption and transformation have is that they don't incorporate all of these different aspects because it takes so much time and effort to do these things. But the reality is if you don't do these things, you're likely not setting yourself up for success. And so I think this rolls into the idea of why a holistic change plan is so important. And before I get into the holistic plan itself, I want to talk a little bit about change management.

The diagram in the center, this is from a company called Prosci that is one of the leaders in the change management field. And I like this illustration because it shows kind of these three tenants of success for change management. There's a leadership sponsor and sponsorship for whatever change initiative you're going through or adoption initiative you're undertaking, there's project management, and then there's change management. And I think the reality is I think leadership, and sponsorship, and project management are pretty well understood by a lot of companies. I think change management is really the critical key to success because so many companies don't embrace a lot of these methodologies or they don't have established methodologies for working through change. At the bottom of the screen are just some quick screenshots of different types of change methodologies that exist today. There are lots of them out there, so you can kind of cherry pick what works for you, but I'm going to talk about change management a little more broadly for a minute.

So the definition of change management that I like is that, "Change management is the discipline that guides how we prepare, equip, and support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive organizational success and achieve desired outcomes." And there are two kind of tools of change management that I find really valuable when you're thinking about change. The first one is the results pyramid. This one is something I've gone back to again and again throughout my career because I think I've had experience with the way that things typically work. And when companies are driving change or asking for change, they typically focus on the actions of the people that they want to change and demand that their actions change. And then the assumption is with those changes and actions, you will get different results, but the reality is that those actions that people take are really predicated on much deeper experiences.

And so the reality of how change really works is that you need to start with the experiences that people have within your company and set them up to understand that if they embrace these changes, they will be successful, they will be rewarded, they will achieve the outcomes that they're looking for personally and more broadly for the organization. And if you can do that with your experiences, you start to establish a belief system that has faith in the work that you're doing and that has trust and optimism about the work that you're trying to achieve. And that then drives the actions instead of needing to focus on the actions that themselves, the actions become somewhat self-fulfilling and that ultimately will lead to the results that you're going for.

And so the idea here is that you need to go much deeper and really think about the experiences your employees are having every day, the people that are working your systems are having every day, and focus on changing those experiences to ultimately drive the results that you need. And if you can do that, both the actions and the results will be much more sustainable because they will be self-driven. And that's one of the crucial elements for success.
A second important tool is the change curve. This one's pretty well known, but the idea here is that with any new change initiative, an adoption effort or a digital transformation being a great example of any of those, it starts with this first phase where you see this little uptick in the curve. And that's when people are optimistic, they're excited about something new, and they are generally willing to at least delve in and give it a shot. The reality though is once people delve in and give it a shot, there's this process of learning how this new system works. And during that process here, not only figuring out... Or you're not only doing the work you need to do, but you're also figuring out how to do the work that you need to do in that new system. That leads to challenges around morale, challenges around productivity. And generally what you see is this downward trajectory where people experience these challenges and they go in what's known as the valley of despair.

It's a little bit dramatic, but the key here is to understand that this is a process everybody goes through. And if you can help manage through this valley of despair, what you see is that you start to come out of it once people start understanding the systems, understanding the tools, seeing the value, starting to get comfortable with the way to work in these new systems. And that starts to build this momentum that not only pulls you out of this kind of low ebb of the curve, but starts to accelerate you up and past where you were before, and ideally sets you on a trajectory to a much greater value than you had before you started the change. And if you delve into some of the change management, what's really interesting is that there are different ways to support people in each of these different stages.
And the other reality of this is that the people that are going through this, go through this at different speed. So during any change initiative, people will be at different points on this change curve. And as a people manager, as an organization, you need to recognize that and figure out how you can help people through whatever phase they're in, and this is a really useful model for understanding how to do that.

And then the final kind of tenant of change management I want to talk about starts to delve into this holistic adoption plan. And the idea here is that you need to do three things to ensure successful change, you need to inspire the head, you need to engage the heart, and you need to help the hands. So this is really thinking about the head is about finding the purpose and helping people understand their role and understanding the value of what they're doing as they work through this change. And the second one is really being empathetic and understanding that the challenges that people are going through and supporting them, going back to that change curve, supporting them in any way they need to be supported as they work through this. And finally helping the hands.

What I think is really interesting and important here is this is really understanding that along with the tools and technology that need to change, I think one of the things I like about Elastic Path is that these composable platforms are really the way that we are building technology to support next-generation customer experiences, but bringing in the technology is one thing. The reality is you really need to evolve these entire systems, and that means you can't just bring in tools, you also have to think about how you need to change your processes, how you need to change your workflows, how you need to train people, and how you need to support them as time progresses and as the systems mature. And to be successful, you really need to do all three of these things.

So what are the components of a holistic adoption plan? There are a handful of them, and I'm going to delve into three of these in a little more detail, but at a high level, the things that you need to do to succeed are have a clear vision that links adoption of your new tools, your new system to competitive advantage and value creation. You need ongoing leadership support, you need middle management involvement, and you need assessment of the entire system. The three of those we'll go into a little more deeply. You need to have resources to support adoption and change management efforts. These things can't... Generally, it's difficult to make these somebody's kind of side job or extra work that they're doing. These are full-time jobs and full-time efforts in a lot of cases and you need to acknowledge that.

You need clear communication plans for how to communicate the change and support your employees through these changes, you need training and support for those employees in these new systems and processes and workflows. You need a mechanism that allows everyone involved to provide feedback. It's important for people to feel heard. Again, these change initiatives, these adoption efforts are challenging, they're a lot of work for people and you really need to support people in any way you can. And finally, you need a plan to measure and reinforce adoption so it becomes durable.

I think one of the really interesting things that I read recently about change is that up until the age of 25, your brain is largely adapting based on external stimuli to the environment around it. A lot of us have heard the idea that your brain kind and matures up until the age 25. And the idea there is it's really being formed by not only external stimuli but a lot of external stimuli. The reality is after 25, you can still change, you can still have neuroplasticity, your synopsis can evolve, but the reality is that that change needs to become self-driven. It's no longer going to happen because you put these external pressures, you need to decide you're going to change and make an ongoing effort to change and to do things differently.

And when you understand that concept and put it in the context of this, you realize how much you're asking from people that are going through this change. You're asking them to put in this ongoing concerted effort to change. It takes a lot of energy and requires them to navigate a lot of uncertainty. And it's a heavy lift for people, and it's something that I think is really important to acknowledge. And that's why taking this holistic approach is so important.
So to delve into a little bit of detail around some of these areas, so senior leadership support is something we hear a lot and I think a lot of times it's not very tangible. People don't really have a clear understanding of what that means, so I wanted to give a few insights into what that includes. So for when you're going through these sorts of adoption efforts, senior leadership support means having them play a central role in communicating the importance of adoption. It means participation in ongoing reviews of progress, it means alignment on what it will take to affect the changes required in behaviors and skills across the organization, and it means being available to listen to feedback and concerns from teams.

I think the experience that a lot of people have, both the leaders themselves and the people working with these leaders is a lot of senior leaders have so much on their plate and so much going on that they are more kind of supporting these a little less directly. And I think the reality of these big changes is that that support from senior leadership needs to be very direct and it needs to be very active. And these are some ways that that shows up.

Another really important piece of holistic adoption is to involve the middle management group. They play a really critical role in this. And what that role includes are things like translating the, "Why?" And answering, "What's in it for me?" For their teams. So essentially taking these big concepts and helping explain not only why we're doing these things and why it's important both for them and for the business, but also helping them understand, "What's in it for me?" And why they will benefit by going through these changes as well. Participation in developing objectives, business cases, and adoption goals. Really the idea here is having the middle managers have an active say in how these things happen because they have a much better understanding of how to translate not only the big ideas down to their teams, but also their teams' needs up to the people that are driving these big ideas.

And as part of that, you really need to articulate what changed looks like down to an individual level. You need to help people understand what the implications are of this change, what their role is in this change, how things are going to be different, and what the expectations are for them. And then finally, you need these middle managers to have this ongoing role in conveying the most important information and messages to their teams.

And the final component of a holistic adoption plan that I'm going to talk about in a little more detail is this idea of assessing the entire system. This involves employing a systems-thinking approach to anticipate direct impact as well as impacts for teams working in adjacent tools and systems. I think the reality with these big changes is that they are so broad and they're working in such complex dynamic environments that when you make a change in one area of the system, there are often unforeseen implications in other areas of the system. And the idea here with taking the systems-thinking approach is to do your best to understand how those changes are going to impact the system more broadly, but also understand that you might not be able to prognosticate and understand everywhere that these changes are going to have an impact, so you need to be willing to adjust as you go.

A second component of assessing the entire system means not only looking at the people and the technology, but also the processes and the data. I think in a lot of cases the perception of adoption is that you buy these new systems and these new tools and technologies and you plug them in and you turn them on, and that is what this transformation is about, but it really needs to be looked at more broadly. You need to really understand not only how the tools are going to change, but how the system which in those tools reside is going to change as well. How again, the processes, the workflows, the day-to-day operations are going to change, how people need to be supported, what documentation you need, all of these different things that are really part of understanding the broader system.

And then also understanding how the data needs to change, how you might need to change the way your data's engineered or other ways you need to connect data sources so that the data that you're using to power these systems gets where it needs to go, in the format it needs to be in. And then finally, the last piece of this assessing the entire system is identifying changes to existing roles and anticipating resource gaps and how you need to fill them. This is a tough one, there's no question about it. I mean, all of these are tough realistically, but really understanding these changes and understanding how you set people up for success is a critical component. It looks different for everybody, but you really need to embrace this as well.

The last thing I want to do is talk about a specific example from REI, something I've been working on for almost a year now. And this is part of that broader effort to approach change holistically. What is on the screen now, and I understand this is an eye chart, but what you're seeing is a content value stream map. And what this does is it looks at how... This is looking at current state, we also have a future state version of this, but this is how content is created today at REI from the strategic planning, when the marketing people are figuring out what we want to do over the course of the year and what the big brand stories are, all the way through to different messages showing up to customers in the context of a sale or a campaign or something like that.

And you probably can't see this in a lot of detail, but there are a ton of little red, unhappy faces throughout this. And that is because a lot of the parts of this system don't work well, and they have a lot of waste if you're into lean, there's a lot of waste in the system. And as we think about building the future system, we really need to think about how the way things work today have to evolve. This work is happening in conjunction with the technology effort to understand what are the tools that we need, how do we bring those tools in, how do we integrate those tools? And ideally, all of these things become wrapped up in this kind of broader holistic understanding of the system. And the content value stream map, this again is the current state map. We have a future state map as well, which is taking all this and then working with a group of stakeholders to identify what are the areas that need to change to set us up for success?

And then essentially what you're doing is a gap analysis, it's something I'm working on right now, is figuring out what are the bodies of work that exist as you go from where we are today to where we want to be down the road? What is that work? Who owns that work? Is it part of existing initiatives? There's a lot of things that go into this, but I think what I really want to accentuate is this is really focused on those processes and on the governance, and on the operations of the system, and not just on the tools. And it's part of really understanding these big systems and how they need to evolve. And I think this is essentially an adaptive challenge within this broader adaptive challenge of the system, but for me, it is an example of taking a holistic approach to changing the system. And it took a lot of time and effort to do this. It's again, taken close to a year to get where we are.

And there's a lot of value in the specifics of knowing the work and understanding the work in there, but I think the value that I didn't necessarily anticipate it, and that is maybe the true value of doing this big undertaking, is that it's driven a level of understanding of what we're doing and why we need to change, and also a level of alignment and understanding what are the most important areas that we need to change. And having that shared understanding and that alignment is crucial to overall success. Finally, I want to acknowledge that this is a lot. There are so many different things you need to consider as you think about these big changes because, again, it's such a complex and dynamic environment that you're working in.

And so I think part of adaptive challenges is acknowledging that it's a big undertaking. You don't know everything you need to know to get where you're going to go, and so you need to just do the work to be able to intentionally plan for how you can succeed. There are a lot of resources out there, a lot of insights out there. A lot of companies have found a lot of success in doing this, and so my suggestion is take all of that in and filter it through the lens of your own work and figure out what's going to work for you. And with that, I'm going to throw it back over to Alec for QA.

Alec O'Dell:
All right, Matthew. Yeah, we're going to get into some questions now, hopefully. We currently don't have any in, so if we don't get any in here shortly, we will give people back a little bit of time in their day.
So yeah, again, last call for questions, guys. If you have any, just submit them in the Ask a Question tab. But while we're waiting, I want to thank you, Matthew and Abisola for being here today, taking the time to present that content to our audience. We really appreciate that. This webinar was being recorded, everybody, so keep an eye on your inbox for that. It should come in one to two business days, so you can share that link out if you'd like for people to register and view the recording. If you're already registered, you'll just be able to join in like you did today.
But all right, it looks like no questions are coming in, so Abisola and Matthew, you got off easy on the Q&A. The audience isn't always this quiet, but I know we had plenty of people in here. But in the meantime, thank you both for taking the time and thank you to Elastic Path for making today's webinar possible. Again, this was being recorded. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us at webinars.cmswire.com. Thank you all.