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Powering Business Transformation
Look beyond borders to see how organizations harness the power of IT to pursue greater profitability
by John Davies
December 10, 2004
During the recent economic downturn, companies adopted survival strategies to weather the lean market. They reduced spending, conserved resources, and cut costs. At the same time, the worldwide recession forced businesses and governments alike to take a good hard look at their operations—to assess far more than just cost structures and overhead.
Today, businesses are looking at growing their top-line revenues as well—and seeing how they can reinvest bottom-line cost savings into strategic growth areas. Organizations realize that they can't save their way to creating successful new products, providing memorable customer service, or outpacing their competition in emerging markets in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.
In all cases, first movers are using advanced Information Technology to grow in these areas—from equipping their sales forces with mobile devices that give them instant, unwired access to customer and product data, to deploying state-of-the-art grid computing technology that enables researchers to collaborate on new product design and development.
As I meet with customers and partners around the world, one theme surfaces continually: modernization. Whether it's a small winery in China, an oil company in the Middle East, or a large hospital in the United States, industries are transforming their businesses through a strategic use of a whole new generation of IT. These transformative solutions use the combination of innovative business processes and emerging information technology to build competitive advantage.
Business transformation is a continuous process—not just a single event. Organizations large and small must constantly sense and respond to market conditions and opportunities, and adapt their processes accordingly. It's not enough to do a better job at what you're already doing—to apply more or better IT to the same old status quo processes.
One of my favorite examples of organizational transformation is Bumrungrad Hospital in Thailand. Bumrungrad changed the entire health-care experience for the patient by streamlining the registration process, putting patient information at caregivers' fingertips electronically, and automating the billing process. This integrated solution combines both front-office and back-office operations in a single, multilingual database, with wired and unwired access from desktops, notebooks, and PDAs. It has been so successful, and has created such efficient use of their existing resources, that Bumrungrad found it could forgo planned construction on a second building.
Mobility, Mobility, Mobility
Mobility is possibly the best example of how industries and governments are changing the way they do business. Wireless computing is evolving rapidly, allowing deployment of wireless data services on a larger, commercial scale, and maintaining a data connection with a remote network from almost anywhere is a reality. Pervasive wireless computing has the potential to radically change the way people work—freeing them to work wherever they want, whenever they want, and connect to and collaborate with colleagues, suppliers, and customers around the globe without having to plug in to a hard-wired network.
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