This article was originally published by Defence & Security Systems International.
In a technology-savvy age, defense and security companies cannot afford to let data silos cloud their working methods. Hugh Blethyn, Sopheon managing consultant and former Royal Navy commander, tells Defence & Security Systems International how the company's innovation management software Accolade can help military organizations make better decisions about innovation investments.
How is knowledge management affecting decisions within military organizations? Hugh Blethyn: Gathering and using information within complex, time-critical military environments is an age-old challenge. The acceleration of technological development, the proliferation of data and the speed with which it is disseminated and accessed have profoundly changed the nature of warfare, and at Sopheon, we work with governments and commerce to keep pace with the competition and meet today's needs for defense and security innovation.
How is Sopheon uniquely equipped to improve military organization and decision-making? The effectiveness of an organization's decision-making ability depends on building an effective knowledge system to satisfy the information needs of users across traditional hierarchical structures. Through Sopheon's enterprise innovation management software Accolade, we can flatten organizational hierarchy, ensuring that activities, no matter how small, are aligned to the strategic direction set at the very top.
Accolade allows decision-makers to visualize, explore and prioritize portfolios of innovation investments and activities, and helps them identify the optimal portfolio of products and technologies to invest in. By weighing trade-offs between risks, rewards, costs and resource requirements, companies can deliver more high-value new products to market ahead of the competition.
What are the key considerations for military organizations when it comes to streamlining their decision-making processes?
Accolade aggregates data from across the organizational community, providing executives and program managers with crucial information faster, enabling informed decisions and insights into how innovation strategy is being executed, and highlights market changes that could impact that strategy.
By bringing together people, systems and data from across the organization and disparate external sources, defense executives and program managers gain insight into crucial information. Accolade allows our clients to achieve knowledge and decision-making superiority: we enable our clients to control the key knowledge with which to make superior decisions.
Giving control and having the simple ability to see and make sense of what is actually going on in the contested and data-rich environments of today's defense world is what is distinguishing Sopheon and Accolade as a market leader.
How does Accolade innovation management software work and what are the primary benefits of using this technology?
My experience at Sopheon has been demonstrated that defense is like any other industry vertical, in that it needs to quickly adapt to market forces. However, having been involved in some of the most complex military equipment procurement programs that the UK has seen, it is clear that defense is different. Defense decision-makers in government and industry face the additional challenges of delivering high-value investment programs that need to face the security threats of the next 30-40 years as well as today. Consequently, in order to stay ahead of the competition, they need a knowledge and decision support tool that allows them to see into the future, while also constantly evolving their behaviors and processes. That is why they choose Accolade.
Our innovation management software supports and connects people and daily work streams across departments and functions. This cross-functional collaboration and synchronization results in trusted, timely data for faster and more dynamic decision-making. So whether you are a global defense company managing complexity across your enterprise, a single business unit or amid-size company looking for simple out-of-the-box deployment for fast time-to-value, Accolade innovation management software fits your needs.
How does Accolade foster better collaboration within value chains?
To combat these challenges, successful defense organization are stepping out of their silos, recognizing the huge advantages of collaborating with non-traditional specialist providers and businesses to exploit commercial and defense technologies. Defense organizations are complementing internal capabilities with rich sources of external expertise to create an innovation ecosystem while managing risk and security.
Accolade allows users to identify low-risk products and technologies with the highest commercialization potential and helps both governments and industry leaders gain a clearer view of current defense innovation capabilities, accounting for dependencies throughout the value chain and generating a portfolio of development plans to meet future needs.
Accolade helps to identify the optimal portfolio of products and technologies to invest in. By effectively weighing trade-offs between risks, rewards, costs and resource requirements, organizations can deliver more high-value new products to market ahead of the competition.
