Published on the 13/02/2019 | Written by Heather Wright

You can’t buy a culture that accepts change…

If you think it’s hard to effect digital transformation in a large Kiwi business, consider the task at hand for Tom Cochran when he took on the role of digital leader with the Obama Administration.

“Anyone who has worked in government, public service or any large organisation, will understand when I talk about bureaucracy and the challenges of changing an organisation, especially when you talk about technology, which is an industry born of change, and constantly changing.

“The two are like oil and water. They don’t mix. Organisations like the government are, by design, meant to be methodical and measured and the answer to everything the first time you ask it is no,” says Cochran, who will be the international keynote speaker at the DX 2019 Summit in Auckland on March 14.

“Changing individuals – because that is the fundamental unit of any organisation – is really, really difficult.”

Day one of the Obama Administration, back in January 2009, saw Obama’s team arrive to computers from the previous administration being unplugged and shipped off for archiving so the data could, in theory, be protected in perpetuity – a requirement under laws predating the internet and email. All social media sites were blocked for security precautions, no one had mobile devices, there was no Wi-fi, no Bluetooth.

“To say it was challenging would be an understatement,” notes Cochran.

For Cochran, now a digital transformation consultant, that meant DX had little to do with digital and everything to do with the human element – changing opinion in order to change the organisation.

“If I had to tell you what I did on a daily basis, it was going to meetings with lawyers and procurement specialists to talk about why it was important to do this, why it was important to change policies, why it was important to embrace open source software. And when you try to talk to someone who has spent their entire career buying things for the government and try to talk to them about procuring something that has no cost, smoke comes out of their ears and they don’t understand it,” says Cochran.

A former software engineer, he notes that part of his career was ‘very practical and evidence-based’. You had a problem, you built something to solve the problem, you tested it, it worked, and you could scale it ad infinitum. But that doesn’t work with humans.

“With humans you might be able to convince one person with one argument, but you can’t just take that argument and apply it to the individual next to them because it’s a different person. So, the real challenge is in scaling change management efforts across a large organisation where the individual nodes, if you will, are all unique.

“Changing individuals – because that is the fundamental unit of any organisation – is really, really difficult.

For Cochran fostering change means working to build relationships, establish trust and credibility and understanding you have to earn the right to inject change into the organisation.

“It is really about coming in and listening, leading by listening and earning the trust and respect of the individuals on the inside who are the ones who will affect the change long term in government,” he says.

“Tenacity goes a long way when trying to change a large organisation, as does patience.

“The funny thing about doing digital in government is that it is not innovative so much in the world of technology, but it is incredibly innovative in the world of human dynamics and understanding individual motivations and how to move a large institution through cultural change and DX.”

Cochran says technology provided a significant competitive edge for the Obama campaign, with Obama using the internet as a means of communicating with large groups of people, galvanising them around issues and raising money.

“It is unfair to say it is the thing that won the campaign, but without it, it would be very difficult to win. Let me put a finer point on that: over two presidential cycles, the campaign raised US$1.2 billion using the internet.

“Money in politics in the United State is what gets you over the hump and allows you to win. And using a unifying force and a mechanism and channel to communicate with anyone at any time using any device, like the internet, and being able to capitalise on it, is a complete game changer.”

He admits we’re not talking anything too high tech here.

“In 2008 it was actually a lot of emails. Email still is one of the most – if not the most – effective fundraising mechanism as well as the mechanism to communicate one to one with individuals.

“It’s as close as you can get to free. Twitter, Facebook and all the other social media platforms have eclipsed email in terms of what seems to be a larger scale method of communicating with individuals, but what we forget are that these are closed networks that are owned by companies that need to generate revenue and therefore the organic reach really is not there. And it’s decreasing over time.”

Cochran says to achieve high levels of engagement on social platforms, costs a lot of money.

“But when you acquire email addresses, once you have them the cost of communicating with that individual is as close to zero as you can get.”

Cochran says the digital transformation seen over the Obama period was significant – and it’s remained in place post-Obama.

“One of the things we as public servants are proud of would be that a lot of the tools we pushed for and advocated for are still in place in the current administration. I take pride in the fact that the continuity of government and the smooth transition of a government includes the transition of the tools and technology used to communicate with people, and whether you agree or disagree with the political ideology of the candidate who becomes president, the president still needs to be able to use these tools. “

Remember the computer archiving of day one of the Obama administration? Fast forward to day one of the Trump administration.

“It was handing over social media account credentials, making sure the existing website was adequately archived in terms of being a frozen-in-time snapshot of what the site looked like the last day of the Obama Administration – that goes to the National Archives.

“To say it is smooth would be an overstatement, but it’s far from utter chaos.”

As Cochran himself notes, “It’s an incremental gain to change a massive organisation, whether government or private sector. It is very difficult, and it takes a really long time to change people’s minds and you have to work diligently with significant tenacity to push them in the right direction to do the right thing.”

The DX 2019 Summit kicks off 14 March 2019, at SkyCity Convention Centre.