Archive for the ‘innovation’ Category

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3 Ways CIOs Can Spark Innovation In Their IT Departments

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Image CreditThe spark of innovation is already in your IT department, you just need to let it spread

The spark of innovation is already in your IT department, you just need to let it spread

If Steve Jobs was still with us, do you think that he might be willing to come and work in your IT department? He was supposed to be a jerk, but man can he bring some innovation to the table. CIOs who want to foster more innovation in their IT departments probably couldn’t get Steve to sign up with their IT team; however, I’ve got three suggestions that just might light the spark of innovation within your IT department.

Ask And You Shall Receive

So why isn’t there more innovation going on in your IT department? Based on how much time CIOs spend talking about innovation, you’d almost think that it was a part of the definition of information technology. One reason is that innovation isn’t happening is because you may be looking for it in the wrong places. The companies in the IT sector that are the most innovative know that the best ideas can come from anywhere in the organization.

The problem is that all too often IT employees feel that they have too little opportunity to provide input to improve the way that things are being done. Confirmation of this has been revealed by studies that show that the average U.S. employee’s ideas are implemented once every six years! It should be pretty obvious that innovative companies are the ones who spend more time implementing more of their employee’s ideas.

As CIO you need to clearly communicate to everyone in the IT department that you value their ideas and that you want them to suggest them. You’ll have to take the extra step and show them that their ideas are being implemented in order to get them to make more suggestions.

You Gotta Make Time

Just exactly when do you think that your IT staff will be coming up with these innovative ideas? If they are working non-stop from the moment that they arrive at work until the time that they leave, you won’t be getting the innovative ideas from them that your IT department so desperately needs.

This is exactly the kind of issue that only a CIO can step in and solve. You are going to have to very clearly communicate just how important you view innovation as being. After you do that, you’re going to have to put your money where your mouth is.

As CIO you are going to have to carve out time during the work week that your IT department employees can use to work on creative ideas. Clearly not all of these ideas are going to result in something that will benefit the company. However, the bet is that enough of them will so that it will make it all worthwhile.

It’s All About Execution

As CIO you might think that the most difficult part of the innovation process is coming up with the new idea. You’d be wrong. It turns out that where we all seem to struggle the most is in executing the ideas. Once again, this is where the CIO can step in and make things happen.

As CIO you need to establish a clear process that the IT department can use in order to prioritize ideas that IT staff are creating, assign resources to the most promising new ideas, and then find ways to test the ideas.

Finding ways to do all of these steps quickly and cheaply means that your IT department will be able to run more experiments and that means that you’ll be able to reject the ideas that don’t pan out and keep the ones that provide the greatest benefits.

What All Of This Means For You

We all like to talk about the importance of information technology, but in reality, innovation is the thing that allows an IT department to continue to improve. A part of every CIOs job is to find ways that will allow his or her IT department to do a better job of innovating more.

It’s not easy to do all of the things that an IT department has to do and be innovative. This is where the CIO comes in. You are going to need to ask your staff for their inputs on how to do things better. Even more important, you are going to have to take action when they provide their inputs.

In order to allow innovation to occur, you need to allow workers to make time for it. This may take time from other IT projects, but it will be well worth it. Once they’ve shared their ideas with you, it becomes your job to the hard work: executing on their ideas.

CIOs who learn how to collect innovative ideas and then turn them into IT department improvements will have found the secret to running a successful IT department. Nobody ever said that this was going to be easy. However, learn to do it right and some of that Steve Jobs magic just might show up in your IT department.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How much time each week should you allow your staff to spend being innovative?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I’m working with new CIOs I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into a CIO position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people in the IT department that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for a CIO to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

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CIOs Are Trying To Do Innovation The Wrong Way

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Image Credit Stop looking for that big bang, it's the little ones that you want…

Stop looking for that big bang, it's the little ones that you want…

As the world slowly recovers from its great economic recession, CIOs are gearing up to help their companies do battle with their competitors. Everywhere in this great land you can hear the same words being repeated “I want more innovation!” Umm, ok. It turns out that innovation doesn’t just happen. Instead you need a whole bunch of little changes first. Maybe I should explain…

Innovation Requires Many Little Changes

All too often CIOs believe that their staff just need to spend more time sitting around thinking in order to have more of those “big bang” moments where innovative thoughts just jump in to their heads. Sadly, it turns out that things just don’t seem to work out this way.

Dr. Rosabeth Kanter has been studying how innovation works in companies and she’s discovered something that I think that we’ve all suspected for some time. It turns out in order to make the big innovative changes, companies first need to make a whole series of smaller incremental changes.

What Dr. Kanter has found is that those really big ideas that we all like to spend so much time talking about are really the result of a lot of other work. It’s the incremental changes that were put into place to change how we deal with partners or how we distribute our information that allows a CIO’s team to come up with the big innovation.

It’s All About The Pyramid

Dr. Kanter suggests that that we view innovation not as a stand-alone item, but rather as a pyramid. This pyramid consists of three different, but related, levels.

The broad base of the pyramid is made up of all of the incremental changes that need to be made in order to set the stage for greater things. Making these changes increases an IT department’s level of operational excellence.

The middle layer of the pyramid is the idea factory – this is where new and novel ideas are allowed to hatch and grow. An IT department needs to be able to allow such ideas to flourish and provide them with the resources that they need in order to grow.

Finally, at the top of the innovation pyramid are those few innovative ideas that appear to have the ability to significantly change the company. These are the ideas that need to get the IT department’s full backing and access to the additional resources and talent that will be required in order to allow them to truly transform the company.

What All Of This Means For You

Yes, IT innovation is great stuff – that’s where things like the iPhone and the Kindle came from. However, CIOs who walk around telling their teams to be more innovative are missing the point.

It turns out that in order for innovation to happen, firms have to first take the time to make lots and lots of smaller changes. You need to effectively set the stage for your innovation to happen. By doing this a CIO can create an environment in which the innovation that he or she is looking for will occur.

The “pyramid of innovation” shows that you can’t just get innovation by itself. Instead you need to get a combination package of incremental improvements and that will in turn allow innovation to happen. CIOs who master this will find that perhaps getting innovation out of their IT department is not so hard after all…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How can a CIO best encourage the IT department to create incremental improvements in order to set the stage for innovation to happen?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the biggest challenges that modern CIOs face is how to do a good job of managing their IT department. The burden of making the right technology decisions, managing budgets, and meeting the needs of the rest of the company is challenging enough, but what can make or break a CIO is how good of a job you do nurturing and growing your staff. The folks at Google have the same issues and they’ve harnessed their immense computing power to come up with a solution…

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The Reason That Innovation Isn’t Happening In Your IT Department

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
Image Credit Innovation Only Happens When IT Staff Feel That It's Wanted

Innovation Only Happens When IT Staff Feel That It's Wanted

How many times do you have to tell your IT department: it’s time to start innovating again? The global recession is over, if your company is going to start to grow and be successful, then the IT department is going to have to be out in front and leading the charge. Since budgets are still constrained, it’s going to take a great deal of innovation to find ways to do more with what you currently have. Why isn’t anyone doing this?

You Are Not Alone

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but as CIO (or as almost-CIO) you are not alone in this absence of innovation. Lots of firms are finding that their IT departments are missing that spark of innovation also.

What’s going on here? That’s the very question that two researchers, Feirong Yuan and Richard Woodman , set out to answer. They sent out surveys to 100′s of employees of companies and they covered everyone from the top of the pyramid to the folks working in the mailroom.

It’s All About Image

Their findings were actually quite interesting. What they discovered is that innovation in an IT department is being withheld because IT staff are concerned about the risk to their workplace image that being seen as being innovative would cause. The power of creating unfavorable social impressions with their coworkers is what is keeping their mouths shut.

A lot of this can be tied back to just exactly what a given IT worker’s job title is. If it doesn’t explicitly say “innovator” in their job description, then you’ve got a problem. IT workers who are not expected to be innovators feel that their coworkers will develop a negative impression of them if they start to suggest different ways of doing things.

This goes even one step further. The researchers discovered that many IT employees fear that too much innovation on their part will start to “provoke anger” among their fellow IT coworkers. This will be especially true with those workers who are happy with the way that things are – the “don’t rock the boat” mentality.

The Role Of The CIO

As the CIO, it’s going to be your job to make innovation happen in your IT department. If you don’t, then you won’t be CIO for very long. What you are going to have to communicate to the entire IT department is that the whole organization is behind the push for more innovation.

Showing that innovation is what is being expected will go a long way in setting the stage for your IT staff. Telling the department over and over again that you are looking for them to be innovative will serve to lower the perceived social risk of coming forward with innovative suggestions.

Your job as CIO is to create an IT workplace where your staff will feel comfortable in being innovative. This means that you are going to have to make everyone understand that individual differences are not only tolerated, but are actually critical in order to help the IT department look at problems in different ways.

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you are going to have to make the most out of the resources that you have – funding will always be tight. This means that you are going to have to find ways to get your IT department’s staff to get creative and innovate. However, recent studies have shown that workers who are not expected to be innovative often worry about their image and don’t speak up.

In order to change this, as CIO you are going to have to clearly and repeatedly communicate to the IT department that innovation is not only encouraged, but it is also expected. You’re going to have to create an environment in which all workers feel comfortable speaking up and being innovative.

There is no one magic action that you can take to make your IT department be more innovative. However, given time and a consistent message from you that innovation is a good thing, you can convince everyone in your IT department to think hard and become the innovation engine that the company is going to need in order to both survive and thrive.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What is the one thing that you think a CIO can do to make innovation happen in an IT department?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Every modern company should have an IT department. Every company should have a smoothly running IT department that adds value to everything the company does. I’m betting that most companies have about 50% of what they need – they’ve got an IT department. What’s missing is a way to transform that IT department in to a savvy IT department. For that matter, what does a savvy IT department look like anyway?

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Lab Rats Invade A CIO’s World

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
What Is A CIO To Do With An R&D Lab?

What Is A CIO To Do With An R&D Lab?

I work in the telecommunications field a lot and the gold standard of corporate R&D labs has always been Bell Labs. These guys have created amazing things that we all take for granted today: transistors, fiber optics, etc.

Since most firms have no idea about what to do with their corporate research facilities, responsibility for the labs often falls under the control of the CIO (because most firms don’t know what to do with IT either). Great. So what’s a CIO to do when he/she is responsible for a corporate R&D lab?

The Times They Are A Changing

So why did companies set up their research labs in the first place? Simple, they needed a source of innovation that they could harness in order to become more successful. Unfortunately, the Internet came along and the wheels have fallen off this truck.

In the old days (the early 90′s), researchers used social networks to exchange information and drive their research forward. No, not Facebook or Twitter – we’re talking about the early 90′s here. They used the REAL social networks that formed when researchers went to conferences or met in the lunchroom.

The arrival of the Internet has turned this world upside down. If you can connect with anyone over the Internet, then why would you even bother to have a corporate R&D lab?

It turns out that there is still a reason for corporate R&D lab, it’s just that they are going to be much smaller and the value of even having an R&D lab will go down.

CIO’s And The New Era Of R&D

Steve Lohr over at the New York Times has been talking with folks in the corporate R&D world to find out what the future of R&D Labs is going to look like.

Pull the cover off an R&D lab and you’ll discover a machine that can turn ideas into products. In the future, the ideas that a business can turn into a product (which is what a business is in business to do) won’t come from a lab, instead they will be coming from all over. Wow, what a mess.

In the future companies aren’t going to be able to afford to have the old style R&D labs. These labs were paid for by corporate profits. Once again, that dang Internet thing has come along and leveled the playing field and those corporate profits are now under pressure from everywhere. Now that they are gone, there’s no way to pay for old-style R&D.

The new way (practiced  by HP, GE, and IBM) is for CIOs to transform what a corporate R&D lab does. The new role for an R&D lab is for it to act as a communications hub between researchers who can all be located at remote locations.

The sources of new ideas can be universities, start-ups, other businesses, and even government labs. Researchers will have to start acting like human Googles and start sucking up all of the information that they need to create products that their firms can sell.

Final Thoughts

CIOs who find themselves in charge of a company’s R&D labs have a delicate challenge on their hands. No matter how successful the labs have been in the past, the past is the past and what worked then will no longer work. CIOs need to move aggressively to transform how R&D research is done.

Realizing the Internet changes everything, CIOs will have to create an R&D “hub and spoke” logical design where the corporate R&D team funnels communications between multiple parties in order to move innovation along. Ultimately, when enough information has been gathered to allow a product to be created, then a CIO will know that his / her R&D lab is doing what it needs to do.

My question to you is do you think that today’s CIOs have the skill that is need to pull this kind of R&D lab transformation off?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok CIO wannabe, we’re right in the middle of a global financial crisis and your IT budget has gotten slashed so much it looks like Freddie Krueger has come back and had his way with it. What are you going to do about your spending on security programs: cut ‘em, hold the line, or spend more. Whoops – that was a trick question: all of the answers will get you in trouble…

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Can CIOs Drive Innovation & Boost Quality At The Same Time?

Monday, October 5th, 2009
How To Capture Innovation Without Going Broke

How To Capture Innovation Without Going Broke

How are you at walking and chewing gum at the same time? It’s sorta a classic challenge – do two different things simultaneously and do them well. CIOs are facing the challenge today – cut costs and simultaneously use IT to make the business more competitive. How hard can that be?

Say Hello To Six Sigma

If you’ve been to a book store recently and looked at any of the books in the business section, you may have been overwhelmed by the number of titles that had the words “Six Sigma” in them. Six Sigma is an approach to business that makes use of constant measurement and analysis in order to continue to optimize business operations.

Dr. Sara Beckman has researched this technique and points out that Six Sigma was invented at Motorola and popularized by Jack Welch at GE. If you apply it to how an IT shop goes about doing its work, it can be a great way to drive out costs and boost quality. However, it will do nothing to drive innovation.

Say Hello To Design Thinking

Design thinking is a new set of skills that are designed to drive innovative thinking. The starting point for design thinking is for solution designers (who else?) to start by focusing on what problems their customers are having on a daily basis. Once they understand the problems, the next step is to consider the wide universe of possible ways to solve these problems.

The Problem

Here in lies the problem. If you go out and talk to today’s CIOs you’ll find that they have generally implemented one of these two different solutions (Six Sigma is more popular because it’s easier to understand and measure).

This causes problems. It is possible to focus too much on driving out costs and then lose your way and not be able to provide the innovation in IT that is needed to keep the business competitive – this is the problem that HP is currently facing.

Likewise, if an IT department is too innovative and doesn’t watch the bottom line closely enough, then they can quickly drive themselves and the company out of business. The dot.com fiasco was a great example of this.

What’s The Correct Solution To This Problem?

You may have already guessed it, but the right way to solve this challenge is for CIOs to take the time to find a way to incorporate both the design thinking and the Six Sigma approaches into their IT departments.

The design thinking technique allows an IT department to find ways to explore new approaches to solving the problems that the business is facing. Six Sigma techniques allow an IT department to find ways to improve how they are currently doing things.

Final Thoughts

CIOs can’t allow their IT departments to become too focused on just one approach or they risk failing. Design thinking tries to find out what a good solution to a problem is while Six Sigma assumes that a solution is good and then goes about trying to make it even better.

CIOs who can find a way to reduce costs while at the same time driving IT innovation will be better at finding ways to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The times they are changing. Let’s take a moment and have a talk about one of a CIO’s key survival skills: the ability to successfully negotiate office politics. Specifically, if you could only have one best friend, who should it be: the CEO or the CFO?

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