By Leon Erlanger

The spoils go to the speedy — in a foot race as well as in business. Being first to market with a product can be the key to success. In fact, the first mover's advantage can help a company capture market share, take advantage of price premiums, recoup development costs, increase and retain profits, and thrive in a competitive market.

To be first, though, a business must understand what its customers and prospects need. It must also have the resources and processes to turn that information into action and, ultimately, new products and services. Increasingly, this paradigm is being enabled by IT. Database applications can capture, manipulate and analyze complex customer and market information, while enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business systems can automate and accelerate business processes.

Enabling business innovation is increasingly a job for IT. "You enable innovation by helping people to try, build and test many things quickly to prove ideas early at low cost," says Aid Galijatovic, Director of Product Management at CA. "However, keeping many different business groups productive and giving them what they need can take a lot of IT time, effort and manual work."

Two IT trends are helping CIOs better meet the faster time-to-market challenge: IT processes that rely on consistency and standardization; and IT process acceleration technologies, such as virtualization and data center automation. Acceleration processes, in particular, are creating big gains by first speeding and automating standardized processes, then putting them in users' hands.

Standardizing repeatable IT processes, such as provisioning servers and storage for IT services, is the first key to implementing such processes quickly, efficiently and accurately. Once IT processes are standardized, entry-level IT employees can carry them out, while IT experts are free to concentrate on business-critical innovations.

Standardization starts by changing the way the IT department views its job, experts say. "IT has come to understand that its role is not about delivering technology, speeds and feeds. It's about delivering business services like claims processing or e-mail," says Michael Disabato, VP and Service Director at the Burton Group, an IT research firm. "IT may understand all the pieces, such as POP3 [Post Office Protocol 3], Exchange servers, desktop clients, and all the routers and switches in between. But in the end, the customers just want their e-mail."