Business Technology Integration
business
2 a: role, function; b: an immediate task or objective, mission; c: a particular field of endeavor
(Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary copyright © 2004 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated)
technology / /
1 a : the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area
(Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary copyright © 2004 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated)
integrate
[T] to combine two or more things in order to become
more effective (http://dictionary.cambridge.org)
We describe business as
any activity involving actions and transactions, commercial or non-commercial.
One of our family members is an engineer for the National Park Service: she is involved in the business of
designing and implementing ecostructure for preserving our national parks. We
believe technology should be used as a way to improve the operation of a
business, any business, in a
way that should be able to be measured by anyone as a quality of life improvement.
If the technology does not bring improvement, if it does not make the user more
effective, then it is of no value.
Most organizations, when they acquire technology (any technology: computers / servers
/ software / tech staff), buy it by the pound and assume: a) that it will do something, and
b) that the more they spend, the more it will do.
The big fallacy in this assumption is that if you do not know, and are not
judiciously and deliberately applying the technology to, the master paradigms of your business operation,
then the addition of technology simply allows you to be ineffective faster. Life
is all about direction, not speed. First, identify the direction, then put the
pedal to the metal.
Peter likes to cite the examples of Sam Walton (Wal-Mart), Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines) and Fred Smith (FedEx):
visionary leaders who defined all the major paradigms and rules that would make major improvements in their business mode
before seeking out the technology to implement the paradigm.
Creating a new paradigm is what set them apart from their competitors, not the
technology that they acquired.
Ironically, most of the rules for how to do this at all levels have already been
written by great Americans like Deming, Juran, et al., but they were
written in the jargon of a particular industry and might as well be Greek to any
other industry. The technology industry has taken advantage of this by selling its product as if it were Home Depot supplying complete
off-the-rack houses, that is, not really involved in defining the home occupants’
needs and not doing the actual construction. At IDEAS, we do our part to
counter this by helping our clients discover the paradigm points that drive
their business and applying quality principles to find the most effective and
economical technologies to implement them. We perform usability engineering, by
which we mean that we engineer systems that make life easier and processes more
effective for our clients (the users). We use our expertise in areas such as interactive design, marketing,
work flow analysis, web business conception, e-commerce and complex network design to
define Total Business Solutions. Only after the solution has been defined as a
paradigm do we shop for the technology. The technology is always subordinate to the business model, and design calculations are made accordingly.
For example, we'll ask you: “As a manager or chief executive, what are the five key things you need to know every morning to know if your
business is achieving its objectives? Does your technology provide those to you
in real-time?” We believe you should be able to see immediately, on
the network, the status of all aspects of your business systems and that
resources are being allocated according to the correct priorities without running voluminous reports in SQL from
an historical
database which is obsolete by the time the information becomes available.
If that's not happening in your business today, call us for new IDEAS.
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