Process Innovation: The Application of IT to Process

Current buzz 

What's being said (around on the web)?

Is there a need for a CIO?

Interesting discussion, but for one thing: process innovation cannot be effective if it is used to address employee compensation or about employee effectiveness. In order to improve process, you first must investigate current processes and find out what people do when they do their job. If they think that what they tell you can imperill their position in any way, you'll get useless data and even more useless "innovations" as a result.

Turning interest into action

This is exactly why process innovation needs to be a focused and directed effort. Innovation (always) starts at the bottom, but it must be directed from the top.

CIO: Chief Information Officer

Excellent description of "CIO/Chief Informaton Officer" job. It sounds a lot like a VP of Engineering job, if you think of the "business" as the "product" (manage development, project management, implementation, etc). When you think about just how much work is involved just doing this much, you start to realize that there's no one left to innovate the product--the application of IT such that it improves business process--to the customer (the business).

Gartner Fellows: Interview with Ku-taek Lee

Lee says that innovating process is a difficult proposition: "many of our employees did not easily agree to change their current processes", and they formed "a dedicated team led from the top of the company to lead innovation and to develop new processes." Are you doing this?

Viewpoint: A retrospective look at process change with an eye to the future

A nice article that describes how process change has evolved and why it's critical for business success: "Any process redesign must be viewed as another form of organization change which takes place in the context of people and organization." IT cannot be "the driver" of process change, but "they are instrumental in creating flexible processes and structures. ...[I]nvestment in information infrastructure is a prerequisite for corporate agility. Such investments must be looked at as having "latency effects" in the form of digital options. At the appropriate time, companies that have built the capabilities to exploit the process and knowledge options that they have created will be the ones that can take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves."

Open-source software isn't dooomed, despite what SAP says.

Although most of this article diverges from the topic this lens is interested in, one paragraph stands out: "Open-source startups and relative newcomers must target a new breed of CIOs, which Graf dubs chief process innovation officers. Rather than old-school CIOs who focus on a company's data management, these guys design processes with the company's network. 'If you want to become strategic to the company, you need to deal with business processors.'" However, the need for process innovation isn't only for open source startups...

Should companies have a Chief Innovation Officer?

This article makes an extremely important point: "This isn't innovation for innovation sake; this is making new things happen that adds value to companies."

Related Topics 

Single Sourcing

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Computer Documentation

Most of the time computer documentation is an afterthought, if it's even a thought at all. Documentation groups tend to be the last ones funded, even though no product ships without it (somewhere). In fact, more documentation shows up all the time, and not just from the company shipping the product.