This past week we published four new reports (free to access) illustrating the flood of innovation hitting our industry. There are more to come in the early new year, but it’s fair to say that the Information and Automation Management sector is seeing more change and new ideas than it has since the dot com era.

The Finnish company, Workfellow, founded by ex-Cap Gemini consultants, brings us an easy-to-use, self-service platform for knowledge/process mapping.

The Italian company TCLab brings one of the most advanced and, again, simple-to-use mobile capture system in the form of AIDA

The German company paretos take business intelligence to a new level with its ‘decision intelligence’ platform.

And finally, US-based HuLoop brings a no-code platform to orchestrate complex process environments.

What fascinates us is that many established vendors and startups are aggressively bringing much-needed innovation and change in tough economic times. They focus on the business case and the user rather than being enamored by the tech. In these gloomy times, they bring some practicality and usability to a sector that has long been overly complex. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of complexity and advanced technology under the covers of all four of these vendors, but for the end user, these are all tools that can be put to use quickly and make a business impact.

Check them out; again, these reports are open-sourced and free to access and collectively help to shed a positive light on this global wave of new ideas and approaches we are currently witnessing.