CSC Thought Leadership Series: Pete Wiese on Innovation

This is the first in a series of commentaries, interviews, and technology briefs from CSC’s leading executives and technologists.

Innovation: Strategy and Implementation

By Pete Wiese, CSC Consulting Group

"Innovation" is a strategic accomplishment of considerable significance to companies in the Aerospace & Defense industry in 2002.

The growing importance of innovative products, services and business processes are offering individual companies and communities of interest just the fuel they need to transform how they do business. Information technology has transformed not only what is being done and how it is being done, but also the way in which business plans are being developed and implemented.

Strategy Defining Technology

Formerly, strategy preceded implementation. A strategy was set as a result of market studies and rigorous competitive analysis. Based on clearly identified key factors for success, threats and opportunities, companies decided where they could compete and how, and embarked on an implementation that carefully followed plan.

The "greenfield" or "clean slate" approach of designing the business, then enabling it with technology is no longer considered a viable approach. Rather, IT and business strategy are developed in parallel such that they support one another. Of those companies reinventing themselves, a wide majority are developing their IT and business strategies simultaneously.

Technology Defining Strategy

Then technology preceded and defined strategy. The more recent information technology eras - ERP to avoid Y2K; the dot-com boom that put up the Web site without the back office to support it; the "exchange" boom that has barely gotten off the ground - all involve technology initiatives in search of a strategic purpose.

It was more important to install a technology first and figure out all the implications, applications, uses, and cost savings later on. The potential of technology to drive business transformation is still anticipated. Those who are reinventors view technology as an investment and expect the breakthroughs made possible by e-business to dramatically transform their companies within the next few years.

However, many companies have recently realized that no single solution can yet provide the collaborative environment across program management, engineering and supply chain management. This has given rise to a number of middleware environments, which hold out the "holy grail" of true collaboration across the suite of business processes. ERP providers and many eAI, engineering and advanced planning companies claim to have the magic elixir.

To date, no one has demonstrated the true capability. This is not to say that we should quit trying or that partial solutions are not providing value. But much of the hype of exchanges and net markets has come and gone, and so too, will the hype and over-promise of collaboration leave in its wake the foundations upon which real progress will be made.

Reality Informing Strategy and Technology

The more realistic objective is to allow strategy and implementation to occur real time, allowing the implementation process to inform and correct strategy, while simultaneously allowing strategy to reiterate and reform processes real time.

E-business capabilities applied to internal and external processes are enabling collaborative communities to emerge, consisting of members who are committed to real-time information sharing to maximize responsiveness, which will support the emergence of a dynamic, real-time interchange. Like budgeting, the value of defining business and technology strategies isn’t necessarily in the end product but rather in the process itself.

Collaboration makes the process dynamic. People collaborate around content, not technology. Technology facilitates - or inhibits - the collaboration by providing the infrastructure and structuring the content in and of itself.

Among companies significantly reinventing the way they do business, reducing time to market, delivering customer service and making the company more flexible/agile are the primary business drivers. All three attributes refocus attention on delivering enhanced customer service in a timelier manner.

Allowing the customers’ reality to define the nature of the collaboration among members of a networked enterprise provides just the knowledge needed to maximize creativity. Many companies report that product innovation will drive their value proposition over the next year or two.

So even though collaboration and reinvention are well worn topics in today’s A&D industry press they are more difficult to attain, than to espouse, and they appear to mark the difference between those leading the charge and those falling behind.

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