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Information Technology (IT) Innovation is key to both businesses and their customers. Innovation enables businesses to create superior products and services that provide exceptional value to their customers. In the long run, innovation benefits everyone: businesses, customers, and the community at large.

What to Do About Proprietary Rights? One of the major challenges of IT innovation is how to deal with the proprietary rights of the business or person that owns the idea or invention behind the innovation. If proprietary rights are too restrictive, there is the danger of a new product or service either costing too much or not being available to the widest audience possible. On the other hand if proprietary rights are not honored, there is the danger of businesses and individuals not investing in new technology and ideas as they quite rightly fear that their investment will not be protected.

Definition of Proprietary Rights. Proprietary rights can be defined as the “property rights of the owners of proprietary information which may be protected under law. In contracting, this term refers to the data belonging to the contractor, and may include financial information, intellectual property (concepts, designs, techniques), technical documentation, etc. Proprietary rights for IT software and hardware can be protected by a variety of means to include patents, licensing agreements, agreements, and contracts.

Proprietary Rights - Enabling IT Innovation. Proprietary systems and patents are great enablers for encouraging the development of emerging technologies. Proprietary systems enable businesses to develop new systems quickly, thus enabling them to build systems quickly that meets their unique needs. Patents encourage businesses to invest in IT innovation projects knowing that their investment is protected if they are successful with the project. See WSJ posting, Patent Gridlock Suppresses Innovation, for how the U.S. patent system can protect proprietary rights and at the same time promote innovation.

Proprietary Rights - Inhibiting IT Innovation. Proprietary systems and patents can inhibit IT innovation when a given technology has matured or is in great demand. Additionally, proprietary rights can inhibit innovation if the owner of the patent or proprietary right is not bringing their valuable idea or invention to market. This becomes a non-value-add activity that hurts the community at large. Because of proprietary standards and patents, other businesses are inhibited from leveraging or further innovating a given IT technology, product, or service. In these cases the patent or proprietary system can maintain artificially high prices for users, limits use of a valuable service or product, or worst case, a valuable product is not brought to market. Innovation of a new technology or idea can be severely limited by the originator of the product or service. See News & Observer posting, Patent law must not stifle innovation, on how patents can stifle innovation.

Apple iPhone - Example of How Proprietary Systems Can Restrict Innovation. Proprietary systems are good when they introduce a new technology such as mobile web access. A proprietary system becomes restrictive when it begins to restrict innovation and further advances in a technology field. An example of a proprietary system restricting open networks is the iPhone. The iPhone has helped the industry define mobile web access, but it has some weaknesses that may be hard to overcome such as a background-processing capability (i.e., the ability to run multiple third-party apps at once). See posting, The Android OS - Open Vs Permission-based Mobile Computing, for more on open versus proprietary systems restricting innovation and open networks.

Since my military days, I have always had a passion for figuring out ways to shorten decision-making cycles. In most cases this has involved automating business processes and getting different systems and sensor devices to exchange data on a cyclic or on-demand basis. Now with the advent of the internet with faster and faster bandwidths, the possibility exists for businesses to about eliminate decision-making cycles.

Information Latency - A Prime Driver of Decision-Making Cycles. With the feasibility of businesses having real-time data, anywhere, any place, businesses need to re-think their decision-making cycles to eliminate information latency and harness real-time data. Instead of business operations having to wait on information, businesses can make decisions real-time. With real-time data, the possibility of “complete” information can be available in real-time, anytime. When you think about it, a lot of business decision cycles are based on waiting for reports or meetings to gain enough information to make a decision. With the potential of real-time data, anytime, anywhere, businesses have a real need to look at ways to innovate and transform their technology to harness real-time data and eliminate decision-making cycles driven by information latency.

Innovating Real-Time Decision-Making. With real-time data, USAF Col. John Boyd’s OODA decision-making loop becomes even more relevant to businesses. The OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act) is a concept originally applied to military combat operations such as dogfights between fighter planes. The OODA loop has also been applied in the past to understand business operations. For businesses, shortening the OODA loop through information technology will always be a key innovation goal. With the advent of real-time data, IT innovation is even more key for businesses to make decisions faster and better in order to continue to offer superior products and services.

Data mashups for the most part are made possible by the advent of the world wide web. Data mashups have the potential to be major enablers for business operations and customer service to leverage the ever increasing amount of business data that is available today. A data mashup is defined as a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. A real estate listing service combined with Google Maps is an example of a mashup.

Business Mashups. Businesses are starting to apply mashups to support business operations and customer service. The key thing for a business mashup is that it be actionable, not just “eye candy”. Just because you can mash together an Excel spreadsheet to data in your ERP system is not a good reason to do it. A good example of a business mashup is where you combine data from your order management system and transportation management system in order to improve customer service. See posting, Business Mashups, for more on mashups.

Data Mashups for Supply Chains. Data mashups and near-real-time data synchronization is a new and interesting trend in B2B eCommerce. Here IT companies are enabling businesses and supply chains to synchronize their data to get better information. Instead of just transporting, translating, and securing data, more B2B eCommerce service providers are helping to synchronize data to help business get better visibility over products, movement of goods, and visibility over key supply chain processes such as product and shipment order management. See posting on Data Mashups To Leverage New Supply Chain Technology for how businesses and service providers are using data mashups to improve decision-making and make new information services.

Enterprises Mashups, Business Intelligence (BI), and Data Warehouses. Large businesses have many internal data sources such as invoice data, purchase orders, shipment status, inventory data, and so on. Traditionally, large companies have used data warehouses to combine and integrate different sources of data. The challenge with using a data warehouse is normally data warehouses can only be access by the few and adding new data sources can take months if not years. Using a mashup approach and mashup software tools, it is possible to integrate different data sources in hours or days. See Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog’s posting, When it Comes to Enterprise Mashups …, for the what, why, and hows of enterprise mashups.