It's a business truism that success comes through growth and -- but how can you innovate in your use of technology without risking funding, reputation, and your entire infrastructure?
If you mention the concept of innovation to the majority of chief information officers, they are quite likely to run rapidly down the corridor, screaming loudly as they do so and firing off pink slips behind them. The mere notion of trying something new has become anathema to many IT managers, driven partly by the spendthrift nature of many late 1990s expansion programs and the subsequent reining in of budgets to the point where merely keeping current systems running is difficult enough without attempting a little experimentation. The flipside of the well-known aphorism "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" -- that plenty of people got fired for trying out something new -- remains evident across the industry.
This is an interesting response given that innovation is endlessly paraded as the lifeblood of the technology industry on a vendor level. This was starkly demonstrated during Microsoft's long-running antitrust case with the US Department of Justice, where the mantra "We live for innovation" was repeated endlessly (and, apparently, successfully).
Microsoft has continued to talk up its capacity for innovation, albeit often in rather broad terms. "Part of what we're seeing in innovation now is taking the world of structured data, like a directory or a customer relationship management system, and the world of documents and bringing those together," Bill Gates told a recent meeting of financial analysts.
While you might not be inspired by the thought of better-structured CRM, market watchers agree that the IT industry is overdue for a new round of fresh ideas. "The technology economy has shown pronounced growth cycles over the past 50 years, alternating with periods of technology digestion when growth slows," writes Forrester analyst Christopher Mines. "We are in such a digestion period right now; history strongly suggests that another growth wave of IT innovation will begin in 2007 or 2008."
The importance of innovation is also widely recognised. "A focus on cost cutting and efficiency has helped many enterprises weather the downturn, but this approach will, in the end, make them obsolete," Gartner points out in a white paper on the topic. "Only the constant pursuit of business growth can ensure survival."
Yet despite this, much business use of technology is anything but innovative. One consequence of centralisation and consolidation is that many large enterprises are running essentially the same core applications in essentially the same way, and thereby minimising their opportunities for expansion. Just how creative can your approach to inventory management become when you're using identical software to your competitor?
Interestingly, the same problem isn't always evident in smaller companies. Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks, creator of Lotus Notes and now chief technical officer for Microsoft, pointed out earlier this year that small companies can often act in an innovative fashion because they are not held back by central policy restrictions. "The tables have turned, and enterprises have become the laggards," Ozzie noted.
A recent Deloitte survey of small and medium businesses identified that creating a culture of innovation is a critical factor in growth, and found that 80 percent of such companies believed they would be able to commercialise the results of such innovation.
"A culture of innovation can be established by having simple mechanisms in place within the business to actually capture innovative ideas and then turn these ideas into commercial realities," says Deloitte director Karina Collins. But just like starting yoghurt from scratch, growing such a culture is not without its challenges. While there may be a multitude of new technologies to explore, how can you decide where to start?
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