Contributed by Ron Rittenmeyer
The power in technology is not the technology itself. The power in technology is taking your business and making it better than anyone could have ever considered it to be.
It’s making you faster in the marketplace. It’s making you tougher in the marketplace. It’s making you a competitor that can be feared by others. That’s the power of technology.
Innovation is the only way to get ahead of the technology curve. Innovation is thinking about the curve and anticipating the changes.
There are three attributes to innovation that I believe really drive business.
First, it has to be attuned to the marketplace. This is not something that typically happens with technology, because technology typically follows and does not lead the marketplace.
Second, innovation has to be practical. People can talk about accomplishing great things that just won’t work because of cost or feasibility. Instead, organizations that want to succeed financially must use technology to deliver something faster. Any innovation must be practical and not just complicate everyone’s lives.
Third, whatever the innovation is, it has to work well. Most importantly, it has to work every single time – all of the time.
When technology is attuned to the marketplace, it forces the organization to think in new ways, aligning with business and bringing significant financial and operational benefits through better processes.
Technology has to be something that actually changes the process. If it doesn’t change the process, why, as a business person, would you want to invest in it?
An organization has to think about how to stay ahead of the marketplace. How do you help people think differently than they’re thinking today about using technology?
This requires a whole different approach to technology, particularly from those at the financial end of an organization. Technology is not an expense; technology is a requirement. The market will leave you behind otherwise.
Executives frequently want to talk about technology and productivity in almost the same breath, figuring that’s how they’ll achieve a measureable return on investment. That tends to overlook some of the basic tenets of productivity.
Productivity requires that you have simplicity. Productivity requires that it’s repeatable. Productivity requires that it has common denominators. You cannot create productivity in an environment that is different in every aspect.
If the technology an organization is implementing doesn’t have some common denominators and processes, productivity then is very hard to come by. There’s no way to get any leverage. Standardization and simplification are truly the only way you can compete in the market today.
There are three aspects to achieving productivity – interactive visibility, automation and simplification.
Interactive visibility is nothing more than a series of very clear, simplistic dashboards. Rather than having stacks of metrics, an organization must be able to constantly track the five or six factors that really matter to its business performance.
The world today is quickly embracing automation, in ways that weren’t true 10 or even five years ago. Every business, one way or another, whether it’s business-to-business or business-to-consumer, is going to automation and to self-service.
Simplification often involves taking legacy information and systems and reusing it or replacing it in a smart way that makes an organization more productive.
It’s crucial that innovation be viewed as practical to those within the organization, and particularly those who are going to have to use it. If the technology implemented by an organization, healthcare or otherwise, is not practical and tied to the business, nobody will ever get behind it.
At the end of the day, you change a business by applying practical innovation, which means it’s aligned with and grounded in the business.
At EDS, we’re beginning detailed account planning processes where we look at every account over a 24- to 36-month basis. We are learning more about clients’ businesses and their strategic goals. Then, we can begin to plan together, to anticipate future trends and implement technology that will keep the accounts ahead of the game.