IT as Process Innovator and Owner: Achieving the Next Level of IT Organizational Contribution

Presenter: Colleen Young

Every business has processes. Not every business manages them. Even fewer innovate them…

• What is IT's opportunity to innovate?
  
• How should IT leaders take advantage of those opportunities?
  
• How will traditional roles and responsibilities change as a result?
  

Process innovation is not the same as continuous process improvement. Innovation means paradigm shift, not incremental change.

NYPD Example: Between 1994 and 1996, felony crime fell by 39%; murders decreased by 50%; theft decreased by 35%; public confidence increased from 37% to 73%.

Operational innovations: changed booking process to make it quicker (from 16 hours to less than 1 hour). 16 to 1 is not an incremental change, but a paradigm shift.

What are the operational processes that we need to generate? For us, is the PGA process, as described, really a process innovation, or an incremental improvement? What would we need to do to innovate to increase the number of applications and to increase the number of enquiries that turn into registered post-graduate students?

If changes are at level of product, sales & marketing or strategy and finance, there are other people to blame. To make operational changes, when they fail there is no one else to blame (this is why operational innovation is relatively rare). "In general… the CIO is not in a position to drive and lead this effort. It can only be done by a senior, business line executive." ("this effort" refers to BPM). Seems that there is no clear role for a COO (Chief operations officer). Does this mean that there is a vacant space that could be inhabited by CIO to look at process management?

If IT stature is high enough, and the business is sufficiently committed to strategic process management, then we have a significant opportunity to direct BPM for the university. We need to take a close look at Colleen's "IT credibility curve" slide, to determine what it is we need to do to increase our credibility. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly surprising here, but may help us work out which changes we can make within ISS that will have the biggest positive impact (bearing in mind our own change bandwidth).

Innovation is doing what no one else is doing—if we look for best practice, if we look for what other people are doing, we limit ourselves—I suppose that, at some level this is an obvious point, but challenging to some of my current thinking for both PGA and WIP in general. However, as Colleen already made the point—if you want to innovate in operations, it can feel pretty exposed.

This presentation makes me think about a Gartner style quadrant diagram looking at change bandwidth and change appetite. When change bandwidth and change appetite are both large, then that's when the real process innovation happens. Big question is "how do we determine the change bandwidth and change appetite of the organization, or part of an organization that will be affected?"