Identify new opportunities ... get your staff involved

By Steve Epner, Founder Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group

An easy way to identify new opportunities for your computer systems is to get your staff people involved. They know a whole lot more than most executives are willing to admit. These people keep the company operating in spite of rules, policies, and procedures that were often designed to cover up or eliminate the possibility that some long forgotten mistake might happen a second time.

There are two questions that will bring out enough ideas to keep your IT people busy for a long time. Before we look at the questions, it is important to understand one other aspect of the top 100. They are not afraid of making a mistake. It is OK to be wrong as long as you learn from it and you quickly recognize the problem and correct it.

This means, it is alright for your people to question what they do. Without the ability to safely ask, progress will not occur. People who are afraid will not take the chance because they are afraid of being wrong. No one was ever rewarded for being wrong in school; they were either punished (low grades) or made to feel foolish.

The only way the following questions work is if your team feels confident that their answers will be used to help the company and not to hurt them. In some companies, it takes months (or even years) to purge old feelings. Only when people feel free to be honest will the benefits be realized.

The first question – which can be a lot of fun in the right atmosphere – is: “what is the dumbest thing you have to do?” If you spend much time working with line people in any organization, they always talk about the dumb things they do every day. These are all opportunities for improvement.

The second question is: “what is the most difficult thing you have to do?” What is slow, time consuming, keeps you from getting your work done? Allow your people to play with the questions and answers. You will learn where the opportunities are for improvement.

There are many possibilities waiting for you. Not all will require automation to be changed or added. If you find easy fixes by eliminating an operation no one can remember why you started to do it, go for it. Every saving in processing time is an opportunity to do something else; something more important; something that can give you competitive advantage in your markets.

Go ahead, imitate the best. You can learn what they already know – there are many ways to improve operations. Many of them are easy to do and obvious once you open your eyes to the possibilities. Then make change part of your culture – and watch the returns.