Image Credit

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.

Related posts:

1. CIOs Are Trying To Do Innovation The Wrong Way As the world slowly recovers from its great economic recession,...
2. New Ways For CIOs To Keep The Staff That You Have First the bad news: it turns out that 25% of...
3. 4 Ways That CIOs Can Start To Make Better Decisions An important part of the job of being a CIO...

Image Credit

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…

Related posts:

1. Now What? When CIOs Make The Wrong Job Move… Sure you did all of the research, you talked with...
2. Hey CIO, Are You Sending The Wrong Signals? No matter if you are already a CIO or simply...
3. What Went Wrong In The IT Department At Mizuho Bank? Mizuho bank is one of the three largest banks in...

Image Credit

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?

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: afraid to, differences are tolerated, fear, image risks, innovation, job titles, new ideas, organizational support, provoke anger, roles, sense of psychological safety, social riskiness

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?

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

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…

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: align it, Bell Labs, business alignment, business it alignment, HP, IBM, it alignment, labs, R&D, research and development, Steve Lohr

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?

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: align it, business alignment, business it alignment, cost cutting, design thinking, innovation, it alignment, it strategy, Jack Welch, Sara Beckman, Six Sigma

CIO's Looking For Innovation Need To Find The Four Techniques

Innovation, innovation, innovation – everyone wants it, but nobody seems know know how to get and keep it. CIOs are under a lot of pressure to do more with less these days and being able to nurture an environment of innovation sure would help. The trick is HOW to do this…

The Problem With Innovation

One of the big problems that CIOs have is that when they start to think about innovation, they start by imagining a big blank sheet of paper and then they try to figure out how they can be innovative. This is exactly the wrong approach.

It turns out that how to innovate is NOT a blank sheet of paper – what techniques work is well known and now what techniques work together is also known. Two professors, Dr Frank Rothaermel and Dr. Edward Hess have taken a close look at what innovation techniques work, and they’ve discovered the four that work best.

Four Types Of Innovation

The first thing that CIOs need to realize is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to finding an innovation strategy that works for a firm. Instead, there are four different approaches that seem to work the best. Just to make things more complicated, each of the four different approaches can be be combined. However, not all combinations result in more innovation. Let’s take a closer look.

The four different types of innovation that work best for firms are:

• Recruiting & cultivating human capital,
• Spending more on internal R&D
• Strategic alliances,
• Acquiring technology ventures

It is important to note that all four approaches can be pursued individually or all at once. However, going after more than one approach can allow a firm to achieve a higher level of innovation, but some strategies don’t mix well and can cause a firm to end up wasting both time and money. The key is to know which techniques work well with each other.

The Best Way To Foster Innovation

You knew that I was going to say this: the research shows that the best way to achieve continuous innovation over time is to hire and cultivate talented people. As always, this is something that is easy to say, but very hard to do.

The reason that taking the time and investing the money in your staff is the best way to foster long term innovation is because this approach allows an IT department  to to have more control over their IP and creates a steadier pipeline of innovation since no outside partners are being relied on.

To improve the odds of this approach working, the best IT departments build teams that are made up of both star and non-star employees. This allows the stars to look for new ideas while the non-stars turn ideas into successful products. Once again, you can see that although this is a powerful idea, it takes some serious CIO management skills to make it happen.

How To Combine Innovation Techniques

When a CIO decides that innovation must be boosted, all too often they will start throwing money at a variety of different techniques without fully understanding how they will (or won’t) work together.

For example, investing money in creating alliances is often done to create the same type of knowledge that companies can get from investing in their own people.

CIOs that invest in both approaches end up wasting money because of the overlap. The key question that a CIO needs to answer before perusing an alliance on top of developing star and non-star employees is to understand what key assets will be gained through the alliance that he/she can’t get from  their own employees.

Dr. Rothaermel and Dr. Hess have discovered that the two approaches that work the best together are alliances and acquisitions. CIOs that take the time to  form a joint venture with a vendor partner company before trying to buy it gives the CIO critical inside information on the target firm.

It turns out that both alliances and internal R&D spending also complement each other. Internally developed knowledge allows CIOs to better understand what market areas will become promising and this allows them to invest in the most promising alliances.

Final Thoughts

There is saying that goes “there is nothing new under the sun.” This holds true for CIOs that are seeking to boost the innovation in their departments.

It turns out that studies have shown that there are four innovation techniques that work the best. These four techniques can be combined and used together; however, CIO should only pursue multiple innovation strategies if they complement each other. CIOs who can grow innovation within their departments will have found a way 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

With a little luck we can all agree that storage is a boring topic to talk about – I mean when you store something, it’s just sitting there not doing anything.CIOs prefer to talk about data in motion – reporting new sales or opening new markets. However, it turns out that storing data is the foundation that the company is built on and CIOs need to do this the right way…

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: align it, business alignment, business it alignment, CIO, Edward Hess, Frank Rothaermel, innovation, it alignment, it governance

Mark Hurd Has Done Wonders At HP - Now Can He Find Enough Innovation?

HP’s CIO Randy Mott has done some fantastic things in helping to turn the company around. However, now things are starting to get tricky and it’s not clear that the company is going to be able to continue to be successful. Everyone seems to think that what they need is a shot of that “innovation juice” and it’s not clear that Randy’s going to be able to deliver it…

What HP Did Right

Ok, so let’s admit it – HP had lost their way under Carly Fiorina’s guidance. They brought in Mark Hurd as CEO (who then brought in Randy Mott as CIO) to turn things around. Hat’s off to Mark – he’s done a great job.

Ashlee Vance over at the New York Times had a chance to talk with Hurd awhile back and he revealed that he sees HP in terms of four “quadrants“. These quadrants include operations, products, business & technology trends, and competitors.

Clearly Hurd has an analytical outlook on life – many people have remarked on just how good he is with balance sheets and dealing with numbers in general. It turns out that this is both good and bad.

The Problem That HP Has Now

HP has done a fantastic job of cutting staff, reducing costs, and negotiating great deals on parts. Having achieved just about all of the benefits that one can get from doing these types of actions, the question that comes up is “what next?”.

Shareholders like growth and in the immediate past, HP’s been growing by cutting. Now that that’s all done, how will it maintain its growth? This is where that pesky thing called innovation comes in…

Old Solutions Won’t Work!

HP used to be able to count on the famous HP labs to come up with new product ideas that would show them the way forward. However, in the current era of budget cutting and project justifications, HP has shrunk the number of projects that their labs are working on from 130 down to about 50. That may not be enough to have enough of those “eureka” moments where breakthroughs happen.

Next Steps For HP

The trick here is to find a way to recapture that “juice” that a technology company like HP needs to have in order to survive. This is exactly where CIO Randy Mott should step in.

As CIO of HP, Randy is in a unique position to help Hurd out. Since HP sells information technology products and services, their very own CIO is the person who can help them evaluate which ideas they need to run with.

Yes, yes – both Hurd and Mott like to run a tight ship with metrics ruling the day. I believe that that time has come and (partially) gone. Now is the time for Mott to throw open the doors to his IT department and start up some trial projects and initiatives. HP is so large that they could easily run multiple evaluations in parallel.

Final Thoughts

HP has made a remarkable comeback from the brink of despair. However, as they try to move forward, innovation and clever sparks of imagination are what’s going to be needed. HP’s CIO Randy Mott has the resources and the talent in his shop that would allow HP to use itself as a testing ground for encouraging its employees to make suggestions and have them tried out. Let’s see if they make the most of this opportunity…

Questions For You

Has your IT department lost its spark of creativity due to relentless efforts to drive costs out of your organization? Do you think that just having a highly efficient organization is all that is needed or does innovation also play a role? What do you think HP could do in order to re-awaken its innovation engine? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

Coming Up Next Time

What would you say is the biggest challenge that CIOs are facing today? All that today’s CIOs seem to get a chance to talk about is costs. What’s missing here is a way for CIOs to communicate in a company-wide manner just how much value the investments that the company is making in IT are returning – the revenue of IT if you will…

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ashlee Vance, business, business strategy, Carly Fiorina, ceo, CIO, customers, Hewlett-Packard, HP, HP labs, information technology, innovation, IT, leadership, New York Times, Randy Mott, strategy

A Poor Man's Netflix Viewing System

Normally in this blog I try to cover issues that are facing CIOs and everyone who works for them. You know, things like aligning IT with the rest of the business, staffing and retaining the best talent, prioritizing IT projects, that sort of thing. But not today.

Instead, I’m going to take a break from such weighty matters and tell you about how a cheap bastard (me) built his own 21st Century entertainment system. Oh, and how you can too.

So here was my dilemma: I’ve been a loyal Netflix subscriber for a number of years now. I realize that times are changing and that Netflix’s model of shipping DVDs out to customers won’t last much longer. In fact, they realize it too. That’s why a number of Netflix movies are now available to be watched online (I think that the list is about 21,000 and growing).

Now a lot of these movies are trash – sorta like straight to DVD releases from back in the 80′s. But there are some gems among them: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, past Seasons of The Office, etc. I had spent some time watching these on my little laptop; however, there was a problem – the wife.

For some unexplained reason, she really, really did not like watching video on the little 13″ laptop screen. It might have been because I kept moving the screen so that I could see it, but I can’t say for sure. No matter what, if I was going to tap into all the video goodness that Internet held I was going to need to find a better solution.

Now the folks at Netflix had a bunch of different solutions for my problem: I could get an Xbox 360 and link to the Internet and Netflix though this. Or I could go out and get a Roku device that can link to the Internet and stream Netflix movies to the TV.  However, as always, there was a problem – both of these solutions cost money. Did I mention that I’m a cheap bastard?

One more small item added to my complications: my main TV is quite old. In fact I believe that I bought it back in 1991 just about when 35″ TVs became affordable. My heart is filled with lust for those big 50″ LCD systems that I see every time I go out to Best Buy, but the engineer in me refuses to buy one until OLED units become available / affordable. So I don’t have any of those fancy computer to fancy-TV hook up ports to use.

Poor Man's Analog TV Ports: Video, Left Sound, Right Sound

So what did I do? I went to Radio Shack, of course. I figured that there had to be some way to hook my very generic HP laptop up to my older TV. It turns out that there is! I needed to get two parts:

1. A 6-Ft. S-Video to RCA Video Cable (Radio Shack part #15-3027)
2. A 6-Ft (1.82m) Shielded Audio Cables – One 1/8″ stereo right-angle plug to two phono plugs (Radio Shack part #42-2483)

The (empty) boxes look like this:

Radio Shack Parts Boxes (Empty)

After making my purchases, I hurried home to try out my Frankenstein video creation. To make a long story short, it worked. Here’s an ugly side view to show you what the hook up looks like:

So there you have it: yet more proof that every technical problem has a cheapskate solution!

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Analog, cheap bastard, movies, Netflix, Radio Shack, RCA Video Cable, Roku, S-Video, Shielded Audio Cables, TV, Xbox 360

A discussion about innovation reveals how far we've come and how far we have to go.

While trolling the Internet over the holidays, I came across a write-up of the Unstructure Event held that was held Orlando, Florida, USA on 17 Nov & 18 Nov 2008.

Unstructure is basically a platform for open discussions on a wide range of business topics. They had a face-to-face meeting back in November. What caught my eye is that they spent some time discussing one of my favorite topics, IT and business innovation.

If you need a great quote on how IT leaders need to behave, you can always count on Nelson Mandela:

“A leader… is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go on ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind” – Nelson Mandela.

During Unstructure conference, Linda Hill from the Harvard Business School, ran a panel that included four panelists from companies such as Cisco, Powerwave, Smiths Medical and another academician from Carnegie Mellon.

The panel’s primary focus was on trying to answer the question “How can an IT department unlock innovation within the organization?”

Sure, a manger can tell / force the people who work for him/her to do things and that will cause things to occur. However, a true leader can create a world that people want to belong to, to harness talent and diverse slices of genius of people around who need to affirm individual identity and allow them to contribute to the larger goal. That’s the difference between a manger and a leader.

I think that Linda Hill hit it on the head when she said that: There is a need for collective work through creative abrasion, creative agility, integrative problem solving, sense of belonging and civic engagement. Amplify differences and leverage them as resources even though it does not feel good. A person needs to feel a part of a community to want to give them his/her slice of genius, else it makes them vulnerable.

Linda also said that: Innovation happens when artistry blends with Engineering. It takes both sides of the mind, and different disciplines or specialists working together to breed innovation.  When Imagination meets Engineering Precision, this makes for a positive impact and changes the way the world lives, works, plays and Learns.

From an IT point-of-view, the question is will technology play a role? We all know that the answer is yes! The next wave of innovation will be captured through collaboration and connecting ideas inside out and outside of the IT department.

As much as we’d all like to have our IT departments be known as being innovative, the question remains: how? Speakers on the Unstructure panel said that innovation cannot be nurtured in a streamlined process. An example of this was  the campaign run by Barack Obama in the elections where several new channels were used to run the campaign.

Good discussions all around – my hat is off to the the folks over at Unstructure. It appears as though it’s still not clear how we can transform an IT department into a smooth running innovation machine. However, we seem to be asking the right questions and we are making progress in working towards finding an answer that will work for us all.

Do you feel that your IT department is innovative? Do you have a way of using creative abrasion to make sure that nobody gets “too comfortable” with the way that things are? What steps are you taking to make your IT environment more open to innovative thoughts? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business, CIO, creative abrasion, information technology, innovation, IT, leadership, strategy, unstructure

Toyota Has Several Ways To Prevent Processes From Becoming Stale

Despite all the talk about innovation these days, we know how things really are. It’s way too easy for us to set up IT processes and procedures that we use to run our IT shops and then over time they become part of a larger “That’s The Way We Do Things Here” culture.

The problem with this is that over time things change. Solutions that were once the best way to do things may no longer be the correct way to be doing something. However, we get caught in our ways and that starts to slow the whole IT department down and then the whole company.

Toyota has found a way around this problem that we can all learn from. They’ve come up with innovative ways to keep their IT employees constantly thinking about how the company can reach out and get new customers, enter new market segments, enter new geographic regions. Additionally, employees are challenged to consider better ways for the company to go after competitors, as well as how to create new ideas and come up with new and better practices.

How does Toyota accomplish all of this? One way is that they set nearly unattainable goals for the company. These goals are what push the company to overcome its existing routines and achieve new levels of performance. One such goal is stated as delivering “a full line in every market”. This is nearly impossible for Toyota (or any car company) to do, but it does a great job of making all employees feel as though they are working together to achieve a common goal.

Toyota’s goals are vague – on purpose. Goals like “create a cleaner car” don’t have clear, nailed-down requirements. By doing this Toyota ensures that employees won’t be able to look at a goal and say to themselves “that goal doesn’t apply to me”. Instead, vague goals result in multiple departments ending up working together in order try to achieve the goals.

What’s interesting about Toyota’s cars which are sold globally is that they aren’t modified to meet local needs. Instead, Toyota takes the time to customize its products to meet the level of consumer sophistication that is found in each country.

IT needs to adopt this way of thinking: how can we modify the way a user interacts with an application to reflect what department they are in? Finance may need sophisticated reporting tools, but sales probably does not.

One of Toyota’s greatest strengths is that it has built a culture in which there is an eagerness to take risks. This excitement about trying new ways to accomplish tasks is what allows Toyota to overcome those things that are blocking it from achieving its almost impossible goals.

Unlike so many other companies, Toyota is not constantly “betting the farm” on massive new projects. Instead, they have adopted a process by which they come up with big plans that they then go about implementing by taking a series of small steps.

This approach coupled with a philosophy of never giving up has allowed Toyota to be successful. When Toyota was developing an environmentally friendly car, they had a lot of failures – engines wouldn’t start, batteries died, etc. However, they never gave up and the Prius was eventually created. Even this car is not the final result, but is rather a stepping stone towards where Toyota wants to get to.

Toyota’s embrace of experimentation has not been done willy-nilly. Rather, they have a structured process called Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) that is baked into their business processes. What makes Toyota different is that employees are encouraged to speak up when something fails or when they run into a unsolvable problem. Toyota’s culture of open communication has a great deal to teach all IT departments.

Does your IT department encourage employees to try new approaches to problem solving? Have you created an environment in which employees feel free to speak up when they run into a problem that they can’t solve? Do you consider your goals to be achievable or impossible? Is this a good thing? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business opportunities, experimentation, goals, information technology, innovation, IT, leadership, risks, Toyota