So continuing my recap from the CFO conference earlier this week, and particularly the keynote presentation from James Dallas of Medtronic...
As the CFO conference started, the moderator flashed some statistics on the screen from a recent study conducted by CFO magazine focusing on a few areas around technology. One of the statistics focused on whether or not CFO's felt that the technology they had in-house gave them a competitive advantage. Approximately 60% of the survey respondents said that they thought that technology "did" give them this advantage.
As Mr. Dallas started his speech, he seemed to question these results--querying the audience and asking them who had ERP, who had CRM, who had BI? And as everyone answered that they did, he asked the $64,000 question: "So if we all have the same technology, if we're all using SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc., how does that make us more competitive? We're all using the same products!"
Well that got the room buzzing, and certainly set the tone for the rest of his excellent keynote speech. But something struck me as ringing very true in his statement. If we all have the same technology, how CAN we make it so that we're more competitive and excel ahead of our competition?
The answer for me is crystal clear. You use the product better, smarter, you find ways to make your people more productive and make the technology work for them. In their jobs, in their roles, in their processes. The reason that so many technology projects fail is because we ask our teams and employees to change the way they work to fit the product. What results is a huge spike in usage of the product right after training, followed by the "blue" (if you're typical) or "green" (if you're lucky) ski slope of erosion of usage as people drift away from the product or leave the department, and return to what they were previously using. And the technology hasn't helped anyone.
But by fitting the technology into the way your company works, and focusing on what makes your workers more productive with the same technology that your competition is using, that's where the difference lies between #1 and #2. The game isn't won in the center--everyone has the technology.
No, as Mr. Dallas reminded us so capably, the game is won at the margins--and a focus on making the technology work for you, vs. you working for the technology--that's where the battle is being fought today.
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4 comments:
It is an interesting question as to how you can be competitive relative to someone using the same core systems as you. One way is to make sure you control the critical decisions that drive your business. Even if the process and data you use are very like those your competitors use, you can still inject differentiation by controlling the rules you use and by analyzing your own data to come up with unique predictions. This is one of the reasons to adopt enterprise decision management and part of what we mean by smart (enough) systems - just enough "intelligence" to act better than a competitor. Check out this post for some links on the topic.
JT
James Taylor
The Smart (Enough) Systems blog
My ebizQ blog
Author of Smart (Enough) Systems
An interesting take, and I don't disagree with the theory. However, the issue is often about process and the fact that metrics (and the systems where the information lives) don't actually map to the way process by which humans are doing their jobs. The reality is that the "process" that the competition uses is like in name only. The definitions, the organization, the metrics, the rules are all different. Many people fail to capture the core differences because they can't truly define the process today, much less the rules. Like some many things, the issue is definition and requirements.
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