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.

1 comment:

Amit Unde said...

When you are doing your day to day work that is pretty much defined, process discipline is important and can be enforced by IT systems. However, challenge is to provide IT support for loosely defined collaborative processes. e.g R&D, Innovation, Knowledge sharing ..
Here IT can be used as facilitator, but not for enforcing process discipline.