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The Benefits of the Team to BP
Daru believes his team has two primary objectives. The first is to change mindsets within the company. The second is to generate business impact through innovative technology.
"Our first job is to evangelize about the possibilities and help the business envision what could be done," says Daru. To do this, his team makes some 100 presentations to business executives every year by holding executive briefings, facilitating vendor site visits, and organizing "Blue Chalk" events. At Blue Chalk events, senior BP executives meet with technology thought leaders and business practitioners. Topics at recent sessions included security, sensory networks, global sourcing, the workplace of the future, and collaboration and social networking.
Daru's team has facilitated significant business transformation at BP. Some of the innovative programs —called "game changer initiatives" within BP—have generated business impacts up to $100 million. One a year for the past five years have been: global sourcing (2002), moving from proprietary to commodity platforms (2003), using wireless sensing to solve business problems (2004), field force automation (2005), and predictive analytics (2006).
A key to success for both BP and its partners has been the innovative partnerships that Daru's team has formed within its global ecosystem of technology suppliers, consultants, venture capitalists, academics, business practitioners, and industry associations. In some cases, BP provides the business milieu for the technology partners to hold large-scale, real-life field trials.
BP benefits by influencing the direction of the pilot tests and receiving discounts on cutting-edge technology. Partners benefit from having a living laboratory for improving their products. BP generally does not seek to own the results of these pilots. Rather, it believes that the more it can encourage commoditization, the lower its costs will be. In particular, BP benefits from its CTO team learning from other industries and then acting as a broker to introduce technologies to its business people.
1 Weiss and Smith / Leveraging Emerging Digital Technology at BP © 2007 University of Minnesota
92 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 6 No. 2 / June 2007
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