EVOLUTION OF BPR

Innovation and execution

Posted on the July 7th, 2008 under Change Management, Enterprise Software, Organizational Transformation, Value of BPR by Gregory Yankelovich

It appears that an average human brain has difficulties to hold on to a concept or idea for a period of time that is a long enough to see that idea or concept materialized. Since we are constantly bombarded by never ending stream of information, many have a propensity to develop intellectual ADHD. The idea of concentrating on “One Thing” as a secret of happiness and success is widely propagated in popular culture, but in business reality it does not often generate profitable quarters.

Can you imagine Apple stock at the current price levels, if with all their innovative products, the company could not execute their basic business processes? Steve Jobs, who is rightfully credited for Apple’s miraculous revival, is known as a visionary leader when it comes to innovation. However small side stories about him being personally involved in selection of the tune for the new product commercials, also offer a glimpse into his focus on details of execution.

So what is more important?

While creating an innovative business process is less visible than developing a new product or investing in factories, our research shows it is actually more important to a company’s success. Intangible process capital is changing the way companies operate and the capabilities they possess. As a result, it also is changing the way they compete.

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/technology/2007/04/27/

The best illustration of this fact can be found in a history of Soviet Era innovations produced, in phenomenal volumes, by hoards of engineers and scientists of their R&D institutions, which have never seen the “light” of industrial implementation.

While I am not personally familiar with any tools for supporting conceptualizing new “cool” products, the execution part is well supported by enterprise software and properly functioning IT organizations. That is not a sarcastic statement, even though it may appear that way - there are indeed successful implementations around, they just don’t get as much publicity as the disasters do.

I was always puzzled by the thought that if enterprise software provides a set of “best” business software, and a group of competitors implement them, what would be the basis of their competition? Lucky for me, Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu came up with some insight and recommendations.

If many businesses in the same industry bought the same type of large-scale commercial-enterprise software, there is reason to believe they would subsequently become more similar, and the competitive field would level. Instead, something close to the opposite has taken place.

Our work suggests three broad areas of focus for top managers:

• First, they need to look at how the company should be doing business differently. That means deciding what new tasks should be enabled with technology, and how widely they should be deployed.
• Second, managers need to lead the deployment of new procedures to success. People don’t like changes to their jobs dictated from outside and embedded in software. Overcoming this inertia and resistance requires skillful leadership.
• Third, managers need to foster innovation by encouraging experimentation, collaboration, dialogue and all of the other activities that generate good ideas. That means building a technology infrastructure and an accompanying set of practices that reduce the cost of creating and replicating process innovations.

The reading their work in it’s entirety is very seminal, however implementation of their recommendations may prove to be more challenging.  Most IT organizations are very technical and focus considerably on risk management, however many companies do not place priority on holistic process (execution) thought leadership culture and discipline.