Am at Supernova today, and JP Rangaswami just brought up a very interesting point. He asserted that there are really only three fundamental business processes, and each of these is enabled by a collaborative technology. The three processes are:
- Idea-to-market: Creating a new concept, and bringing it to market. This process is enabled by co-creation.
- Problem-to-repair: Identifying, diagnosing, and fixing issues. This process is enabled by instant messaging and other real-time and offline collaboration technologies.
- Sales-to-cash: This is all about execution. When a sale occurs, what are the steps that need to occur to deliver what was promised, and get that process done quickly, efficiently and repeatably? This process is enabled by collaborative workflow.
Interesting thought.
Chris, interesting framework and collaboration analysis.
I would think that collaboration between the three processes is also important and perhaps more often missing. Problem-to-repair and sales-to-cash can both provide great insights to the idea-to-market process about unmet or poorly met needs. And how often do organizations seem to have a problem-to-repair process that’s disconnected from the sales-to-cash process.
Certainly lots of food for thought in seeing where collaboration does and doesn’t work throughout these processes.
Paul, great points all. The idea of the inter-process collaboration is perhaps just as important as the collaborative aspects within each process.