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Overview 73

Business Benefits and Ramifications

This activity provides an objective view of the level of sophistication in regard to information use.
Often the survey will stand on its own to make a framing statement for the need for DG.
Approach Considerations

Most likely, the length of the survey will be of concern to your sponsor or initial DG leadership team.
A sponsoring CIO will be concerned with alienating stakeholders or ruffling feathers. Determining the
scope of the instrument will be a function of determining what data you must collect for IMM, and
whether or not you are combining this survey with another. The survey should take no more than
15 minutes in its online form or response rates will be too low to use.
The actual questions need to be very unambiguous. A significant portion of respondents will try to
second-guess the survey. When we blend surveys, we always throw in a few questions that have
obvious answers to indicate possible attempts to influence the results.
Of course, you want as many responses as possible. Respondents should represent, at minimum,
middle and upper layers of management. We prefer to segregate the responses of various groups, as
their answers are almost always very different. In addition, there must be a mechanism to provide
an incentive to take the survey, as well as monitoring and follow-up processes to deal with
laggards.
If the assessment is being done via facilitation or interviews, attempt to make the meetings as
structured as possible. A group session should fill out the survey via a form, then tally and review the
results. Interviews should cover a core set of questions in a survey format. The interview should also
be used to collect personal impressions from interviewees. The population for interviews will be
much smaller, so make sure the sponsor understands the IMM survey will be more anecdotal than
statistical.
This activity is not considered optional, although it can be merged in with a change readiness
assessment.
Sample Output

Figure 7-4 shows a sample of some of the types of questions asked. All the surveys we use take this
form of answer scale (called a “Likert scale”). We feel it provides a decent distribution regarding the
answers and gets us closer to seeing how the organization really feels about how data and content
are used.
Figure 7-5 shows two panels from the IMM results from the case study in Making EIM Work for
Business. (UIC is the fictional company.) The maturity scale ended up as a 1.8 (subjective based on
concurrence with the sponsor and executives).
Tips for Success

Surveys have become a very popular means within organizations to measure just about everything. As
a result, any attempt to survey may be met with suspicion or people may feel that they are not worth
the investment in time. Depending on how survey results have been used in the past, you may be
surprised at how far you need to go to convince personnel they will remain anonymous. If the survey
history in your organization makes it a poor choice for you, consider facilitated focus groups
conducted by individuals outside the DG organization. It will take longer but may lead to better
results.