Too Much Innovation Can Create a Process Bottleneck

Very interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about finding the right balance in innovation. Customers want more innovation in everything from products and services to pricing and delivery. But there has to be a balance. Perfect example is Telcos where there are so many plans and models and variations that the system has simply broken, as witnessed in this post from Paul Greenburg - perhaps the most painful thing I have ever read. If you have ever dealt with a telco you know instinctively that their business is simply broken. I wouldn't even bother saying that there processes are broken because, frankly, I don't think they really have processes. I have the sense that they are in a constant state of plugging holes in the dam.

The Deal Architect has also written extensively about Innovation and the need for business process angioplasty that arises when complexity simply overruns the human's and the machine's ability to deal with it. But I think that much of the complexity is actually caused by innovation. We have noted the problem of the general ledger becoming the trash bin of the business, rendering it less than useful for the purpose for which it was originally intended. But we see similar problems all the time. Some companies actually create a new billing process per customer, or at least it seems that way. This is ok when you have 10 customers but by the time you get to 100 you have created more cost than you have added revenue.

In many of these cases the word innovation is being used rather liberally. A lack of discipline, or the inability or lack of desire to negotiate assertively with customers, is not innovation, but it introduces a 1000 new variations into our businesses and processes and at the end of the day we have no choice but some serious angioplasty. It's worth the fight to keep your business and its processes clean, simple and clear.