When IT implements a new system, it seems like users ought to be overjoyed at getting some new functionality that IT knows will make their lives easier and their business more streamlined.
Then how come three-quarters of CIO's say they achieve only 20-25% of their optimization goals?
Optimize Magazine's article, entitled "Process Optimization That Measures Up" by Bruce Rogow, points out a few things that are worth taking into account:
- IT people have become obsessed with a perspective that everything in the business can be reduced to a process diagram, can be improved, optimized or outsourced. While process efficiency is important, it is only one element of any business.
- IT doesn't take into account what is necessary for effective human adoption. The article points out that a number of IT shops are making new, elegant, enterprise architectures and applications available to their organizations. But business executives and end users have not been allowed to participate in the process -- and these are the people who matter most to the end result.
- If IT continues to focus on "hard" process efficiencies, that narrow-minded view will get in the way of providing the true differentiation needed in the global competitive environment of today.
So if there's one thing to pay attention to when leveraging systems for business advantage -- and is really common sense when you think about it: Systems exist inside of a larger whole -- and the whole system (i.e. business) needs to be taken into account. Many executives think the leverage will happen by shifting to or incorporating an attention to the "softer" processes -- those things that don't follow a linear process -- like innovation, product design/development, marketing (check out the Marketing Interactions blog for awesome insights related to marketing systems), knowledge exploitation, among a longer list of functions.
In my experience, if IT can iterate through the development process, and follow up with end users about what they're using and what they're not -- and if they're not using it -- find out why, rather than try to force them to use something that apparently isn't working, then the ratio of optimization realization will go up remarkably. In one case, I worked with the users to design the "perfect" implementation, or system for them -- but they weren't really using it. I was wondering why, and I went to a meeting with the primary user for the system, and she had these Excel spreadsheet printouts. I saw that was what she worked off of. I asked her if we could output that format for her from the system, would it make the system more useful. She was delighted at the idea of receiving an Excel spreadsheet formatted report -- and would never have thought to ask for that functionality -- but it made the whole difference in user adoption of the system. But it took commitment and follow-through to figure that out. Approach the conversations with end users from the standpoint that they want this optimization -- they want their life to be easier --- they want to be IT's partner.
I say -- hooray for the common sense approach of this article -- it's a step in a good direction! And a way of challenging yourself to think about how systems/applications and business processes interact and how the business and IT can work together to achieve the common objective.
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