Go to SearchCIO.com Searchlight

Gentlemen, please lay out your economic recovery plans in 140 characters or less.

What their answers came down to was that employee and customer expectations are changing and that in turn, the business has to change. Customers have come to expect Web-based services, and they want them now. That means that IT has to swap out older systems and business processes quickly. Employees don’t want to wait four years — or even four months — for new features and fixes to be rolled out. It’s about giving the business a competitive advantage through faster IT deployments.

If that isn’t enough to convince you, Alex Adamopoulos, CEO at New York-based Agile consultancy Emergn, whose clients include British Airways, British Telecom and Standard Life, has five more reasons for adopting Agile practices:

1. To stop project paralysis: Agile translates into faster feedback and faster delivery. That means that IT delivers projects that keep up with the pace of the market and customer expectations.
2. To accommodate change: Plan for change with Agile, instead of protecting the process and focusing on mitigating the risk of inevitable change.
3. To make room for innovation: Agile allows for employee creativity and better idea management, which is often stymied by heavier processes.
4. To improve the work environment: Agile enables companies to invest in their people and to “up-skill” them. As a result, Agile leads to happier, more productive employees who in turn feel more passion and ownership towards their work.
5. To give the businesses transparency and control: Agile lets businesses identify where the greatest value exists in the organization’s portfolio of projects. Thus, Agile improves overall quality in delivering any type of project in the organization (IT or business related).

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director

Unlike old-fashioned focus groups, cloudsourcing and the lean methodology ensure that businesses stay focused on customers’ needs while continuously improving business processes to eliminate waste, save money and ensure customer loyalty.

My story on Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.’s lean initiative on SearchCIO.com this week demonstrated how an organization can bring employees from various departments together to identify redundancies in business processes. Putting lean concepts to work, in 2010 Nationwide was able to trim $2 million in excess costs, according to Mimi Chizever, vice president for claims technology at the Columbus, Ohio-based insurance company.

According to Chizever, the lean methodology is all about understanding interdependencies between departments; reusing code and other resources as much as possible; and above all, staying focused on customer requirements. The lean process works backwards: Instead of finding a market for a product, companies find out what customers need, then focus on solutions and deliver them just in time.

One way to find out what customers need is to use cloudsourcing. This is a technique in which companies poll their customers to drive development. The idea comes out of the concept called crowdsourcing (where businesses look for feedback, ideas and talent in a crowd of users), but the cloud aspect enables the interaction to take place anywhere, through a Web browser.

For example, Vision Critical Communications Inc., an interactive market research company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, uses its Sparq cloud platform to manage research data from thousands of respondents to its polls quickly and conveniently. Sparq also is available to Vision Critical clients so they can deploy surveys, review results and communicate with their customers.

Auto racing organization NASCAR, for example, uses the Sparq platform to ask race attendees their opinions about various issues and generate buzz. Other Sparq users include the National Football League, Major League Baseball, ESPN, Taco Bell, Nordstrom, Frito Lay — about a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500, according to Andrew Reid, Vision Critical founder.

Vendors including Oracle Corp. are jumping on the cloudsourcing bandwagon. Oracle announced last month that it would integrate Accept Corp.’s Accept360 crowdsourcing software with its Oracle CRM On Demand. The integration will enable users to create internal and external social communities where customers and partners can collaborate and vote on, and prioritize product, campaign, services and opportunity innovation ideas.

Even New York City is getting into cloudsourcing, launching an online program called Simplicity, which is based “on the idea that government should be organized around the needs of its customers, who are taxpayers, businesses and service users,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his January State of the City address. “In the year ahead, we’ll launch online forums where every city employee can post ideas that he or she thinks will improve services or save the city money. Others will be able to comment on those proposals, and then we’ll implement the best ones.”

IBM’s 2009 Global CIO Study, released this week, revealed that more than half of the 25,000 CIOs surveyed said they plan to implement low-cost business processes this coming year. I started to wonder which low-cost business processes they were talking about and why they were suddenly on the rise. I did some research and came across two business process methodologies that could be considered “low-cost” — the GE Workout business process and fast track decision making.

The GE WorkOut business process isn’t new. GE developed it in the late 1980s as a way to help its own organizations and others become more lean, efficient and responsive to changes in the market. The GE WorkOut process works by bringing together a cross-functional team to solve a business challenge in 90 days. Taking on an issue identified by senior leadership, the team creates a plan with actionable items that must be implemented within the 90 days.

Companies using the GE WorkOut process — including L.L. Bean, Frito-Lay, IBM and Metropolitan Life Insurance — are doing so to streamline and simplify processes, eliminate non-value-added work and speed up the decision making process, according to C.A. Schifman and Co., a training and consulting firm. The process also allows companies to break down silos and improve employee morale.

The fast track decision making approach, meanwhile, is a rapid problem-solving method developed by the North Shore-LIJ Health System in 2002. The organization developed the process to deal with change and allow the right people to make decisions based on their areas of expertise. The LIJ was continuously struggling with change issues from corporate initiatives such as merging 18 individual hospitals into one health care system. The FTD process works by allowing teams of people closest to the process in need of improvement to develop and implement appropriate solutions. The process includes team involvement and in-meeting decision authority.

These two methodologies sound a little like “light” Six Sigma and Lean to me. They allow companies to build their own process methodologies at a low cost and customize them to their own business culture. So if you’re looking to use a low-cost framework and find Lean and Six Sigma intimidating or expensive, these two might work better for you.