There's a huge opportunity to improve productivity inside IT, which can then be leveraged into huge leaps in productivity at every level of your enterprise, an opinionated Adam Kolawa recently told InformationWeek in an exclusive interview. CEO of software tools vendor Parasoft, Kolawa holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech and has written three books on software development, including his most recent one, The Next Leap In Productivity (Wiley, 2009), which he says is intended to provide nongeeks with a road map about how IT works and how IT needs to be managed.

"I'm not talking about a 2X or 3X increase in productivity. It can be much higher than that," Kolawa asserted. "People are not looking at what processes there are in a typical organization and how they can be automated. Enterprises need to look at all the processes in their organization as checklists and figure out where there are standardized ways of making decisions. Whenever there is a standard way of doing something, you can put it inside a computer -- you don’t need a human being," Kolawa stated. "Human beings should only be used to make judgments about what goes on the checklist."

He cited a loan-processing example, where a loan officer has the power to approve loans from $10,000 to $50,000 when an applicant’s credit score is more than 700 points. "If the applicant's credit score is less than 600, then you need a human to make a phone call and a judgment. Otherwise, it’s just the case of it being a checklist decision that can be automated via a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process. People say that BPEL is a 'programming language to connect computers,' but I say BPEL is better used as a programming language to implement a checklist, to do process improvement."

Read the complete article by Roger Smith in InformationWeek.