Wednesday 14 January, 2009

IT for enforcing process discipline

I was recently reading a blog of Prof Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School where I spotted a very interesting line: (Enterprise) IT can be used to enforce process discipline. I quickly disagreed because IMHO it is only transactional systems (e.g. ERP, HRM, CRM) that can enforce process discipline and not collaboration systems. I also thought that collaboration systems are actually useful when we don't need process discipline. But after a prolonged thinking, I agreed that even collaboration needs process discipline for making it effective and efficient and collaboration systems such as SharePoint can enforce that process discipline.

I would like to get your comments on this thought process.