The Intrapreneur's Challenge: Change Is Too Slow

Datent's first year - learnings and our evolving direction

As technology accelerates, we’re held back by our inability to change. Change is just too slow.

This thought drove me to start Datent, and one year, three Accelerators, 25 client organisations, and countless pitches later it's still motivating me, but the idea has moved on a little.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, plans evolve fast in the first few years of a startup. To quote from my favourite guide, ‘The Startup Owner’s Manual’, “there are no facts inside your building, so get the heck outside” and “no business plan survives first contact with customers”. In other words, don’t waste time philosophising about a business plan, get a rough pitch, share it, get feedback, improve it … and iterate … lots!

The launch focused on flipping the stat that 70% of data transformations fail by playbooking the processes and systems needed for effective transformation. There was an opportunity not only to ensure that data transformations give financial returns but to automate the drudgery within organisations and create more innovative, dynamic, and fulfilling places to work.

When I took that pitch, and iterations of it, outside to pitches, networking events, catch ups with peers one question kept coming back. ‘Are you trying to solve data transformation or solve transformation in general. Both are valid, but I think transformation in general is probably the right focus’.

Honestly the first few times I got that feedback I felt as if they were saying ‘why work on a hard problem when you can work on an infinitely hard one’. Whilst I’m always game for a challenge I wasn’t sure transformations as a whole were a solveable problem.

However, one year in, I’m convinced it’s not only a solveable problem, but its a problem that urgently needs to be solved.

What would it mean to ‘solve for org change’

Prior to Datent, I had no start up experience, and so, understandably, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 18 months reading up on entrepreneurship.

The penny drop moment on solving org change came to me when in an interview I saw Richard Branson comment that he was jealous of today’s entrepreneurs. When he was getting started in business 50 or so years ago there were no accelerators or incubators, VC funds or angel investors, start up manuals or founders associations. If you wanted to build a business you had to start from scratch and solve all the problems associated with starting a business yourself.

That sentiment is exactly how I felt as an intrapreneur, as someone that was trying to transform a business from the inside. When I went to networking events as a CDO and met with peers we were all solving for the same challenges (from data operating models and processes, to comms and literacy plans) from scratch.

As an entrepreneur starting Datent I’ve been able to benefit from a vast and dynamic entrepreneurial startup ecosystem. Nominally, at the moment Datent, is a team of three. Practically we depend on our outsourced subscription finance team and subscription legal service, have coming close to 20 SaaS vendors and when we get to the point of raising or vesting employees much of the paperwork is templated and ready to go.

To some extent founders today can now focus mostly on their startup’s unique challenges and spend minimal time on the problems common to every startup.

In a very real sense, the problem of building an org has been solved, whilst the problem of changing an org has not. It is this imbalance that has created the era of disruption that we live in where the average age of companies on major indices continues to fall.

‘Solving org change’ would mean that intrapreneurs would be able to focus mostly on their organisation’s unique challenges and spend minimal time on the problems common to every transformation.

Datent aims to be this much-needed support system for intrapreneurs, providing the tools, knowledge, and community to drive effective change from within.

Does org change need solving?

The reality is that the current solutions to org change either don’t work or don’t scale to meet the level of demand today.

McKinsey is not just one of the most famous management consultancies, it is one of the oldest. Founded in 1926 when management consultancy was still being defined as a service, it comes from an era where change was just less common or less rapid. There was nothing wrong with planning a five or ten year roadmap to deliver your strategy. In that era it made sense for change specialists to most reside in specialist service providers that you could call upon when major change was underway.

In today’s volatile, rapidly evolving world the need for change is constant. Most organisations talk of change fatigue and, reflecting the demand for change support, most large organisations have their own internal consulting divisions.

I got a lot of flak from friends in consulting as I iterated through problem statements on LinkedIn last year. They felt I was knocking consulting too much. So here I want to make clear once and for all, consultancies can add huge value and are not about to be replaced by a new service.

However, there is no way consultancies can ever scale to meet the demand for change support right now.

So there is a gap and from a demand perspective org change needs solving. Most organisations I speak to about this are crying out for solutions to help them get better at change.

Does org change need solving NOW?

On a relatively recent iteration of the Datent pitch I had somewhat of a gulp moment.

I started creating a slide to summarise the change problem and started by highlighting many of the things I’ve spoken about here and in previous articles.

Give or take, we’re now 25 years in to this era of digital and data disruption.

The former consultant in me went into autopilot, created a timeline, 29 years since Amazon and eBay launch, disrupting retail, 25 years since Google launched making the web accessible, 24 years since Netflix started recommendations…

Then some bullets on today saying that most organisations still:

• Haven’t learned how to evolve their operations to learn from digital natives

• Complain about silo’ed business

• Depend on spreadsheets despite all the advances in cloud, low code ….

Then to finish, what would it look like to extend the timeline another 25 years.

Oh, 2050 … that’s when we’re supposed to reach net zero. GULP

If 25 years isn’t enough time for established organisations to work out how to use data better and copy some of the lessons from digital natives, how in hell are they going to work out how to transition to net zero in the next 25 years. GULP

This is how I now open many pitches and it is why change urgently needs to become easier.

What does this mean for Datent?

I’m really proud of the progress we’ve made in the first year on our initial mission to flip the stats and see 70% of data transformations succeed.

By taking a product management approach to data transformation, we've slashed the cost of providing data strategy and transformation advice, created easy frameworks for common problems like capturing the ROI of data, and delighted our first customers. They've told us they've "never been a part of something where value was so abundantly clear from beginning to end".

Not bad for year one.

And yet not good enough to make a real dent in the org change problem.

That’s why we’re going to do three things.

1. Continue to invest in and scale our Accelerator programme

2. Continue to iterate around solutions to org change and supporting intrapreneurs

3. Start to open source data transformation

The last point is a big one and re-emphasises our commitment to zero tie-in. Change needs to be easy and we firmly believe in the adage, 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’

So over the course of the next year we’re going to open source the basics of data transformation so that anyone can start their intrapreneurial journey and start transforming their org.

As we do this we’ll of course continue to invest in developing our existing and new products and services. But we believe an open standard is needed for transformation and are happy to contribute to starting one.

Next week, we're launching a two-part webinar series to explain more:

1. 'Open-Sourcing Transformation': Discover how we're democratising data transformation and get an exclusive checklist of actions crucial for any successful data transformation.

2. 'Data-Driven Transformation': Learn how to measure how good your organisation is at getting value from data and AI, and build a strong case for transformation investment.

Register now to secure your spot, receive webinar invites, post-event recordings, and exclusive follow-up materials. Plus, be among the first to join our pilot Intrapreneurs Community - your support network for driving organizational change.

Finally, the biggest area for improvement from year one that I'm eager to address is utilising this newsletter more effectively. On the flip side one of the proudest moments from the last year was finding out that a group Datent Accelerator alumni were meeting up regularly long after the course.

Community is at the heart of our plans to support intrapreneurs and change makers. So thank you for registering for this newsletter, it will become more regular and it will be where opportunities to join our pilots are announced.