No thanks, our process is not ready to adopt new technology. We will call you once we get ready for that.

Well, I have a long career in business process and more recently, I started working for world class IT companies, mainly as Sales Specialist for processes related to Supply Chain Management.

Of course, a core function in the IT Sales process is customer prospecting, and it doesn't matter if you do that by e-mail, phone, trade shows, etc. You'll always find someone that says something like "Well, you know? I really love the technology, but I think our company have a large gap in operations and we need to work around people and process before thinking about adopting new technology. Once we get ready, we will call you immediately" or something like "We would like to utilize our actual ERP to 100% before adopting another module" or even something like "We have world class processes so we don't thing we even need technology to do our work better"

Hearing that kind of stuff, makes me think a lot about the real convenience behind process and technology improvement and this morning while I get a coffee, I get illuminated with the notion of the "Disruptive innovation"....

Of course, a lot has been written about disruptive innovation and of course I don't want to get credited for that. However, I tried to apply it to the decision process behind adopting new business processes and technology or remaining in the status quo.

First of all, we need to understand that there are four entities involved in business improvement. The strategy, the business process, people and technology. By strategy, we understand the set of direction, values and priorities that the upper management sets for the overall business. The business process represent the set of entities and rules that shapes the product, cash and information flows inside a company. Both the people and technology are support pillars that enable the execution of the business process. And here is the big question: What came first, the process, the people or the technology?

Before talking about the different models that I was able to identify, I would like to introduce the qualification criteria that I used to understand the pros and cons of each approach. Let's consider the following charts:

In fig 1, we could see the red line marking the performance over time for the status quo on any given process. The need for performance improvement came from increased requirements from the customers stated by the blue line.

The first option, business have to match the process performance to customer needs is to evolve as time goes by, using performance review meetings and implementing changes here and there. The result is usually an under performance marked by the green line, meaning that the business have an "acceptable" ratio of customer complains versus an "acceptable" cost. Let's notice that both the status quo and the evolutive innovation lines mark the comfort zone of the executive in charge.

The accelerated option is to think out of the box and implementing disruptive innovation marked by the brown line. In this approach, the business usually implement, aggressive, disruptive change in order not to match, but to overperform customer requirements and usually takes the company to new paradigms and the customers to new performance requirement levels.

Fig 2 maps the convenience to go after a project according with the reward / risk ratio. In simple words, we always want to go for high reward / low risk initiatives while avoiding low reward / high risk ones.

Now, let's go thru the different combinations of possible scenarios in order to figure out the result of the "let's wait to change the process and then, we could look for technology to optimize the process" attitude...

As we can see in the previous table, the best results could be obtained in scenarios 5 and 8. Both of them implementing a disruptive innovation. With scenario 5, you can improve the process but it will be slow and chances are that you cannot achieve the full benefit potential since the new limitation will be the execution capability of the people in charge. In scenario 8, you'll face an increase of project complexity, but you'll be able to deliver faster and better results since automation overrides the human execution capability.

At the very end, my conclusion after finishing my coffee was that the only way to match the customer requirements in any business process, is to change. This change needs to shape the process, people and technology together in order to overperform the customer requirements since the expected life cycle for any process or technology improvement is getting shorter all the time. At the very end, you need to choose if you want to be a leader or a laggard. In a very competitive world, my choice is crystal clear.

“If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives - Daniel Handler"