BANGALORE:  Innovation, certainly

has been the buzzword in the information technology arena for a while now.

Industry leaders and trade bodies have been long emphasizing that innovation is

the key to growth.

But, innovations are not always successful. Innovating just

for the sake of bringing about a change will not produce the desired results. As

pointed out by Barry Simpson, vice president- global IT Asia & Pacific

division, Colgate Palmolive, during his keynote address at SAP TechEd in

Bangalore, “Innovation must satisfy key consumer needs. If not, innovation

will not be successful.”

Affordability, accessibility, products with a point of

difference--is very important for every company. But, not all have the gumption

to try it out as it involves a lot of risk. “You must be willing to take on

risk and be really sure of why you want to innovate, and how the product will

work for the customer, ” said Simpson.

Coke changed its taste to compete with Pepsi, for a sweeter

flavor, but lost customers in the process, said Simpson quoting an example of

innovation going awry.

He said: “Innovation is the life-blood of an enterprise,

it has to be part of the strategic plan of the business. You must ensure to link

it to the business plan for the success of the business. However, it must

address all key factors--if it only addresses the pricing, without a point of

difference to the business, there will be no funds to regenerate business. So,

innovation must take care on how to produce enough funds to re-invest.

Innovation is not just linked to the product alone— the delivery, service can

also use innovation.”






He said that, innovation must enhance business process, enable faster cycle
times, simplify processes, and reduce costs. Innovating on go-to-market

strategies have also proved successful for companies like Starbucks and

MacDonald's, which used the franchisee model to get more customers without any

investment from their end.

It gets “harder and harder to get the 'perfect

order', he said. “Getting the product to the customer—what the customer

wants, when he wants it, how he wants, during what point of time, the invoicing,

they want faster orders, all sounds very easy. It is very important that the

information cycle time must match the physical cycle time of the business, he

said.

A consistent set of applications enables worldwide

usage--nobody is working with unlimited budgets-the costs of growing IT support,

taking down total cost of ownership, compliance to SOX, security measures have

to be considered, said Simpson. “You can reduce costs by standardizing on

hardware, standardizing on operating systems and the data on top of that common

application suite,” he added.

Service based architecture - the next step of innovation

“I think the key to service based architecture is driven

through the business context and process. “The business context was

changing--started with a global process map; we really needed to integrate for

system design. Approaching design in this way--as business changes--you see how

to innovate on design”, said Simpson.

With global customers in different countries, the need to

exchange data is critical. With global procurement, the “instance mentality”

will not go far; a diversified procurement system will not work, he said.

“There has to be one system for global service and this brings down the

TCO.  ESA allows this. In services

architecture, transactions are no more limited--it is a consistent global

process, on top of them there is the analytical system.”

It is important to have a consistent interface, as the end

customers only care about their applications. It must have a consistent look and

feel, access and the interface should be simple, advised Simpson. 

With services architecture and common hardware, adaptive

computing can be used as a key point for leveraging lower TCO, said Simpson.

“Move shared resources with a common platform. Taking it further, use far more

blade technology in data centers to lower costs.”