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July - 2014 - issue > CIO Insights
Innovation, a Winnowing Process that separates the Impractical from the Possible
Timothy C. McCabe
SVP & CIO- Delphi Automotive PLC
Friday, July 4, 2014
Founded in 1994, Delphi Automotive PLC (NYSE: DLPH) is a global supplier of technologies for the automotive and commercial vehicle markets. Headquartered in Gillingham, England, the company has a market cap of $20.70 billion.

IT has always been a key agent in driving innovation and success for Automotive industry as it has provided it with many technological tools such as social, mobility, analytics and cloud technologies which today are regarded as megatrends. Though in this era of unprecedented competition, creation and enabling platforms of connectedness is the key contribution IT has made. It has managed to subside all the clutter and noise from the path and has allowed enterprises to communicate formally and informally, and share insights, learning, and observations with each other swiftly. IT, driven by CIOs, is now looking forward to build and deliver technology platforms such as personal productivity platform or engineering design platform in order to facilitate business process and outcomes. It will bring the triad of people, process and technology into an end-to-end service that is outcome and deliverable focused.

Performing Early Assessments of Solutions

Technology is proliferating with a never been seen before speed. There are numerous tools and solutions available in the market which has made a challenging task for CIOs to carefully scrutinize and manage the required tools and expectations. As a CIO, I perform early assessments of solutions originating in the marketplace, reviewing them for their capability and applicability, and if we see existence of business value in it, we begin the adoption program. Here, it is important that we inform our vendors if we are not going for a particular service or tool so that they can fathom and work accordingly on it to meet our expectations.

Enabling a tool of "Thinking out Loud"

Innovation is a winnowing process which business leaders utilize to separate the impractical from the possible. It needs context, and it should be relevant, simple, and consumable. At Delphi, we are focusing on designing and building platforms that can facilitate the innovation processes. We are working very closely with our engineering teams globally to understand from a task and deliverable perspective on what a 'day in the life' entails, followed by developing platforms that will improve their efficiency and output. So far we have developed platform capabilities on knowledge management, knowledge repository, internal search, data storage or draft retrieval, and collaboration and sharing. These efforts of connecting our 19,000 engineers are enabling a very powerful tool of sharing and "thinking out loud." (As told to Derek Patrick)

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