Top IT Trends in STRATEGY Drive Projects: Processes Improve in a Flatter World
Continuing with my reaction to the STRATEGY trends from CIO Insight’s Top IT Trends for 2008 :
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CIO Insight: “Process improvement will drive IT adoption- CIOs see process modeling and management applications as the most important development five to 10 years from now.”
PM411: YES! Business process modeling will technology-enable the innovation process. Still need strong research of innovation going on outside the company, the industry, and your country, to feed modeling efforts.
CIO Insight: “The world gets flatter- strong foreign economies and technical workforces present opportunities for growth, savings and technology.”
PM411: This will be interesting to watch as the living standards increase causing higher technical workforce costs. Also, maturity of IT in different world markets varies wildly. See my recent posts on how India’s living standards are changing and China’s IT maturity.
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The idea of research of business process innovation outside industries and countries is still a relatively new concept. With developing world market’s living standards and IT maturity changing I expect that the newer world markets will be the ripest areas for innovation to be copied by US companies.
What do you think? Is “copy” a bad word?
CIO Insight STRATEGY trends sum up in my next post.
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I don’t think that copying is necessarily a bad thing. As to researching outside your specific industry I can only “A prophet in his own land is never seen as such.”
Sensei- obviously, I believe that there is not a whole lot that is “new”- maybe it is because I have gone through several business cycles and watched similar concepts/approaches renamed/reclaimed as “new” every decade. “Copying” to me is really adapting an idea that has not been attempted inside your company or industry. By the way, take a look at my post http://www.projectmanagement411.com/in-search-of-the-business-process-to-support-strategy-execution-and-innovation/ . It has revved up again with some comments from a couple of strategy consultants- interesting comments on different groups developing their own lingo but basically doing the same thing (IT and non-IT management) prompted by your “domain driven” discussion.
I whole heartedly agree with adapting. I guess my “prophet” comment was more of to express the fact that the adaptation path is many times a lonely road, as when the source of an idea is from without, it can be viewed with extreme skepticism, if not down right reviled. Hence by in from executive is critical.
For those companies that can get over the “it’s not invented here” syndrome adopting strategies from other industries can be a huge boost. When you think about, many of the kinks have been worked out and adapting a process to your business can be easier as much of problem discovery has already been done.
I’ll head over to the other post – I’ve been away from your blog for a bit. ;)
Sensei- great point on “kinks worked out”. I honestly hadn’t thought about that and I’ve been applying ideas from one industry to other industries for years. We often feel we have to start from scratch on the implementation and that is just not the case- there are so many problems that can be avoided especially if we make sure to get information on how the “innovation” was implemented.