The Role of the CIO in Transforming Business & Enabling Growth

The ability to redefine business can come in large part today from understanding technology and how it can be an enabler of transformation. The smartest companies realize that a strong CIO can take customer and transaction data and help turn it into knowledge that enables businesses to better understand their markets. When needed, information assets can also help transform business and underlying processes. How viable is it to hire an IT head who really understands the business? Today many companies hire an IT Director as their CIO - someone who may be more experienced at managing and leading only technical employees. However, understanding the business and having an intelligent conversation about it in the board room is important. C-level IT executives are embodied in CIOs like Charlie Feld formerly with Frito Lay and later successful at Burlington Northern and Delta Airlines. CIOs of this caliber have moved into the CEO position.

Fedex transformed itself from a shipper to a major player in logistics. It is now seen as a technology company in the logistics and transportation business. The momentum coming from the top, enabling the CIO.

One important philosophy to embed in transformation projects is growth. Is the transformation enabling business goals and business growth? Here are some thoughts to consider from one high-performance CIO:

The implementation of change initiatives hasn’t always been smooth: business leaders (and IT managers) who had grown used to an IT department that merely took and fulfilled orders had to get comfortable with IT leaders who challenged them and kept an eye on the IT strategy of the broader enterprise. But the changes were necessary—and, despite the bumps, ultimately successful.

• As the CIO for a rapidly growing technology vendor, one client had to scale the IT organization quickly so that it could handle not only its current tasks but also whatever might be on the horizon.

• Keeping systems up and running is just the beginning; the way the IT function uses resources to satisfy the demands of the business determines the real value of information technology. Our client explained how they organized the team to work closely with the business in order to ensure that IT’s investments match the organization’s strategic priorities.

• Even in the tech-friendly realm of Silicon Valley, IT leaders struggle to inspire their own people—and the business colleagues who depend on them—to move beyond an order-taking mentality by striving to understand the needs of the business and proposing innovative solutions to its problems.

Figuring Out What to Fix

Best practice: Conduct high-level interviews with executives and a series of work sessions to identify the biggest problems faced, as well as the top five or six things to focus on in the next 18 months to be successful.

For companies that are strong in product innovation this can not only help to acquire new customers but retain them with excellent service. For example when you sell to CIOs and other senior IT execs who understand IT operations, the expectations around IT customer support and professional services are high. Service capabilities that can remotely diagnose trouble in products and signal it, sometimes even before the customer becomes aware is a way of using technology to be proactive in providing excellent service, which in turn usually leads to growth due to high current customer satisfaction.

Setting transformational priorities – A business & IT partnership

Often when in rapid growth, companies do not focus on improving business processes. As part of a long-term growth strategy, improving business processes can be key. In a normal business process transformation, you would focus primarily on making improvements on the process side. Often, a high percentage of critical processes have IT implications, so you must deal with business processes together with the IT that supports them. Systems and processes are often tightly linked.

Assessment & Methodology to Develop a Roadmap

An assessment can reveal capability gaps between where you are and where you needed to be. Using something like Six Sigma alone may be too rigorous and might not enable you to move quickly enough to get from here to there. Instead, using a Lean or Lean / Six Sigma approach enable you to identify the five top critical process capability gaps that can prevent you from scaling up the business. Attack those gaps with gusto. This enables you to continue to build quickly while also looking at least two or three years ahead to make sure that we had a road map of where we wanted our business and our technology to go. We revisit the road map every year because our business is pretty dynamic. Our problem areas will change, and we need to be nimble enough to address changes in the strategy.

Improve Processes to Improve Scalability

For example, an order-to-cash process might be something needed to improve in order to be able to scale up our business. You might note that a large percentage of sales orders in your company have to be manually touched by someone on the order-management team. Since so much of your business comes at the end of a quarter, that really threatens your ability to scale. So start by attacking that from the business process and systems perspectives. Some companies reduced orders requiring a manual touch by 75 percent.

Strive to deliver tangible business value in 90-day increments

When the company doesn’t see the results fast enough, questions start to pop up. So communication and change management are paramount because you want to show clearly not only the road map but also the results that you are generating by working through the road map.

Significance to our readers: 1) read the Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloane Management Review's analysis of CIOs in the work place 2) No World Borders has helped CIOs in several industries to transform business process and improve organizational effectiveness through organizational development work.

FDA Unveils Database of Drug Side Effects, Procedural Changes

It could be argued that the pharmaceutical and medical products industry—with its high-value, high-regulation product lines—could have the most at stake for achieving operational excellence. Regulatory requirements have risen for this industry struggling to hold down cost.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration unveiled a new effort to bolster its oversight of drugs after they're on the market, in the agency's latest response to years of criticism about its handling of medication safety issues. Ultimately, the FDA is supposed to implement a second phase to the plan, called Safe Use, that will focus on ensuring that drugs are used safely in the real world. But the agency official said there were few details available yet about the plan.

Among other changes, the plan, dubbed "Safety First," involves creating a new database listing possible side effects of drugs, along with clear schedules for following up on questions about them. Also, the FDA plans to make changes to its procedures for making certain regulatory decisions, particularly those based on emerging safety worries, though the new moves don't go as far as some critics have advocated. The FDA plans to grant some new powers to the office that focuses largely on the safety of marketed drugs, known as the Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, among others, has raised concerns about the agency's current decision-making process, because regulatory power over drugs once they are approved rests primarily with the same drug-review divisions that decided to approve them for marketing in the first place. The plan was announced to FDA staff in an email today, and the agency is expected to testify about it tomorrow on Capitol Hill.

The new moves stop short of divorcing the two functions. The safety office will not get the ultimate power to sign off on label changes or recommendations to remove a drug from the market.

The agency will have multidisciplinary groups, including the pre-market review division and the safety office, come together to make decisions. If one office disagrees, it can appeal to higher-level officials. Currently, while this may often occur, it is more ad-hoc. Also, the pre-market drug-review divisions will each get their own new, dedicated officials whose responsibilities focus on safety.

The drug safety office will get primary authority over decisions to approve drug brand names and packaging, though this change will not occur immediately. Eventually, the safety office is supposed to formally get another power as well: the ability to commission certain kinds of research, the epidemiological studies often drawn from patient databases. This could involve requiring drug makers to do such studies -- a power the FDA gained under a new law passed last year -- or contracting with outside sources.

We help your organization keep compliance standards at their highest, while holding costs in check. Our services help companies achieve world-class regulatory compliance and drive operational excellence throughout their organizations.

No World Borders has developed several service offerings by combining our deep industry experience with pioneering technology and capabilities. We work with our clients to achieve sustainable, long-term, integrated solutions at lower cost aligning strategy with people, processes and technology. We aim for speed to value through extensive experience, pre-packaged materials and fast implementation. Our Health & Life Sciences industry group works with clients to ensure that patient need is at the center of everything they do. Within pharmaceutical and medical products, providers, payers and public service health we are transforming global health care by connecting information, insights and technology to improve the quality of the patient experience. Process improvement is at the forefront of No World Border's competencies, which are critical in highly regulated industries.

The Long Tail of Process Automation

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article^[1] to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

The long tail theory can also be applied to process automation and process management. Organizations have thousands of interconnected business processes. This patchwork of process and logic includes human tasks as well as computerized activities that access and update enterprise systems and applications. While all of these processes work collectively to support the goals and strategies of the organization, enterprise software has typically been targeted toward high demand process that are roughly similar across the organization (CRM, ERP, HCM, sales force automation, etc.) For each process automated in one of these enterprise software applications ther are hundreds of highly customized, unique organizational processes that are nota dequately addressed by these systems. These processes are often being managed through e-mail, MS Excel, faxes and telephone calls or handled by custom coded software written by external consultant or internal IT organizations.

The Internet reduced inventory and distribution costs making selling niche products profitable. Similarly, BPM (business process modeling) helps meet niche requirements in areas where historically, enterprise software has fallen short, making the automation of all types of processes more affordable and cost-effective.

Commoditized processes such as order fulfillment and invoicing commonly lack variance and often they are the staple of rigid, off the shelf software such as traditional ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

Typical processes that are roughly similar activities that differ across organizations are require some customization such as capital planning and IT provisioning due to minor variances, they may be streamlined by pure-play BPM software products.

Unique processes require highly specific activities that are organization-specific and often create sustainable competitive advantage, such as strategic sourcing, customer engagement management, have a higher cost of customization, and therefore require specialized knowledge and tools.

A recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, titled "From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail," examines the Long Tail from both the supply side and the demand side and identifies several key drivers. On the supply side, the authors point out how e-tailers' expanded, centralized warehousing allows for more offerings, thus making it possible for them to cater to more varied tastes.

The Long Tail may threaten established businesses. Before a Long Tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.

For example, Web content businesses with broad coverage like Yahoo! or CNET may be threatened by the rise of smaller Web sites that focus on niches of content, and cover that content better than the larger sites. The competitive threat from these niche sites is reduced by the cost of establishing and maintaining them and the bother required for readers to track multiple small Web sites. These factors have been transformed by easy and cheap Web site software and the spread of RSS.

No World Borders BPO / BPM team can help you determine which processes, tools and team members will help optimize your value stream projects. Whether you are optimizing your loss mitigation process in a mortgage servicing company or improving your Internet marketing and lead development plan, we have lived through these projects before and we can add immediate value.