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OUR INNOVATION RACE
HAS JUST BEGUN
Innovation accelerates our growth and fuels
our ability to create value. Even so, delivering innovative solutions and managing change
can be a complex proposition.
While delivering change can be challenging,
3 Step IT starts with the advantage of an enthusiastic employee culture: our team is one of
the most positive and enthusiastic that opinion
surveys have ever encountered. This helps to
make us ready to embrace change.
Just like most of today’s businesses we developed our systems in an era of scarce, expensive
and rigid technology. Scale is a measure of historical success, it’s not necessarily a source of
competitive advantage. Born digital businesses
appear suddenly, they are nimble and they can
present an immediate challenge.
Our team working at the front line, suffer from
fragile processes, see missed opportunities,
and understand the potential lying in data that is
never mined. With confidence built on trust, we
started an innovation race. This harnesses their
enthusiasm and experience to shape our innovation initiatives.
The Application Programming Interface (API) is
one response to the challenge. API’s allow clients to integrate their systems with ours. With
a suitable API they can, for example, integrate
their corporate asset processes with asset information in our own systems, they can link device
replacement plans to logistics systems that will
coordinate delivery and collection. APIs enable
digitalisation to be delivered incrementally, with
our client controlling progress according to their
own priorities.
Employees supplied 135 ideas to start the race.
These provided the raw material for an innovation workshop. Ideas were tested and rejected,
worked up and combined, and finally formed into
five project suggestions.
After more detailed design, costing and business
case effort, we selected the two most promising
projects for delivery in 2018. This was an important and empowering change in employee involvement. It’s a cycle we will repeat this year, to
maintain the innovation momentum and to keep
the culture changing.
In 2017 we laid the foundation for API’s to be developed rapidly. At the end of the year, the first
was being tested, with development starting on
the second, and others being scoped. Suddenly,
new digitalised solutions are possible.
Culture of change
This is not enough: we need new ways of
working to improve efficiency, and we need to
develop new life cycle management capabilities to improve effectiveness and maintain our
competitive edge.
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