“ Consider, too, the Spanish clothing company Zara. It has more than 1,000 stores worldwide, and they all order clothes exactly the same way, using the same digital form, following a rigid weekly timetable for placing orders. Most other large apparel retailers rely on sophisticated forecasting algorithms, executed by computers at headquarters, to determine which clothes will sell in each location and in what quantities. Headquarters pushes these clothes down to stores with virtually no input from their managers. Zara’s store managers, however, have almost complete discretion over which clothes to order; they choose them based on local tastes and immediate demand. This sharp difference between Zara’s and other retailers’ approaches to the same challenge highlights a critically important point: We don’t expect that enterprise IT will inevitably lead to one best way to execute core processes. In fact, it can prompt a great deal of experimentation and variation, as companies try to understand who has the most relevant knowledge to make decisions and where, ultimately, to site decision rights. ”
Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference — I think this is ultimately a really important point. More process doesn’t have to mean less human.
