IT Transformation is Cultural Change

IT Transformation is not a buzz word.  It is a journey that will enable an IT organization to become what it needs to be in order to deliver strategic value to the business and stay relevant.  This requires a structured approach which changes personal and organizational behaviors and embeds them into the organizational culture.

CastlePointe offers the following workshops on leading Cultural Change:

Topic Abstract

Executive Series

Topic CC-1: The Art of Cultural Change - How to Make Change Stick
Senior IT executives must lead their organizations through significant cultural transformations to meet the requirements of modern business.  This involves a significant amount of change - and making that change stick is a fundamental requirement of a successful transformation effort.  This topic provides key insights that senior IT leaders can use to ensure that the change they're trying to embed into their organization takes root.
Topic CC-2: Executive Sponsorship - How to Get It and How to Leverage It Everyone knows that for a Service Management or IT Transformation program to be successful, it must have executive support.  But executive sponsorship may be the most misunderstood and under-leveraged resource in the program manager's bag of tricks.  This topic discusses the right way to get executive sponsorship and how to use it effectively to drive cultural change.
Topic CC-3: Overcoming the Consensus Conundrum and Getting Decisions Made Driving cultural change means walking a very fine line.  On the one hand, you need to drive towards broad involvement from across the enterprise so that people invest in the changes you're trying to make.  On the other hand, you need to ensure that decisions get made so that you can continue to move quickly.  This topic will discuss key ways to overcome consensus, while maintaining participation and investment to enable rapid decision making and a successful adoption.
Topic CC-4: Understanding and Overcoming the Barriers to Change People don't like to change.  When faced with an imminent change, it is human nature to rapidly build barriers to resist the change.  These barriers include the infamous, "that's not how we do it here" to apathy to outright defiance.  However they manifest, understanding these barriers is the first step to crafting a deliberate strategy to overcoming them - and is one of the keys to a successful cultural change effort.
Topic CC-5: Building an Effective Transformation Team Many transformation efforts fail before they even get started because of how the transformation team is assembled.  It is critical that your core transformation team is comprised of the right type of players, from across the enterprise, to ensure that your effort will have the staying power and political support to actually get something done.  In this topic, we discuss the proper make-up of your transformation team and how you should assemble it for maximum effect.

Executive Series

Topic CC-6: Uniting IT: Bringing Apps & Infrastructure Together At Last
From the beginning of the modern technology era, there has been an invisible divide between application and infrastructure teams.  They just seem to be wired differently.  For decades, this seemed to work, but not any longer.  The needs of today's enterprise organization demands that all elements of IT work together transparently to drive value for the business.  Utilizing simple, yet powerful techniques that force application and infrastructure teams to come together to solve business problems, senior IT leaders can bring their teams together at last.
Topic CC-7: Creating an Effective Communication Plan with the "Three I's" Communication is one of the keys to a successful cultural change effort, but most organizations just plain get it wrong.  Most communication efforts are flat and one-dimensional and therefore have little impact.  To be effective, your communications approach must do three key things: Intrigue, Inform and Inspire Action.
Topic CC-8: Driving Cultural Adoption through the 4 Components of Change Getting people to change behavior requires much more than just a memo and some training.  It requires that they become a part of the change - that they invest in it.  To create this investment, you must understand the four key components of driving change: Awareness, Involvement, Understanding and Adoption.

Executive Series

Topic CC-9: The Enterprise Cultural Architecture
IT leaders typically invest significant resources in their technology architecture.  Many have developed robust process architectures.  But perhaps the biggest bang for the buck comes in the development of an Enterprise Cultural Architecture.  Cultures are almost always inherited and often come with a lot of baggage, yet they are often given minimal focus.  To transform an IT organization, you need to start by creating a cultural architecture that defines the core characteristics of the organization you are trying to create.