Lately I have read a lot of articles talking about renaming the CIO from Chief Information Officer to Chief Innovation Officer (or Integration, or Insight…). Maybe I am a traditionalist, but I have always thought that Chief Information Officer nails the role. It is all about the information. How we connect, enrich, derive insights, provide capability, support the business rules, extend use cases or just generally provide capability into the hands of our companies that make us all better, faster or cheaper is core to the role.
That being said, I think innovation is a key capability that the CIO and CTO must support. It helps us in ways that are not incremental improvements, but that accelerates, or even change, the goals of the organization. In many cases, we spend too little effort specifically towards innovation. I think this is mainly because, innovation is not easy. There is no process that I have seen that outlines: Do this and innovation will
occur. Innovation depends things like culture and is unique to the organization and the problems that the organization faces.
Have you noticed that innovation in new organizations looks easier? While it might look easier, it’s not impossible to transform a large, established organization to be more innovative. Within Intel IT, I run the Strategy, Architecture & Innovation Group. I look at innovation as an inward-focused CTO.
From my perspective, innovation requires the resources, the culture and lastly and most importantly, the problems that need to be addressed through innovation. This blog covers the first one and the other two will be covered in future blogs.
THE RESOURCES FOR INNOVATION
The first aspect of innovation is that of resources. While many companies say they support innovation, how do they support it? Do they actually allocate time to it or do they try to fit it in between the cracks?
Here within Intel IT, we look at innovation with several views. First, we have a very small group that facilitates innovation very specifically.
We call it IT Labs and they go through a traditional view of innovation and look at it a bit like a venture capital firm. We perform research that leads to a proof of technology. That leads to proof of concepts (pilots in many cases) and then we transfer to engineering to implement. We look at yields through each of these steps as a way to measure our investments. We expect low yield in the research phase, 40-60% in the proof of technology, 60-80% in the proof of concept and 95% in the transformation step. This helps us with the question, are we taking enough risk in what we are looking at to help the organization?
The second way we look at innovation is by leveraging our IT Service Management framework. We ask all of the leaders that manage our IT portfolios and services to look into what innovations can they come up with to help move the needle between keeping the lights on, and the work to grow and transform IT. This innovation is much more focused and might have many incremental steps between the breakthroughs.
The last way we look at innovation is through cross-organization approaches. We run several innovation harvesting events geared to specific areas.
One is what we call an Innovation Camp (iCamp for short) event. We identify several key problems that we need to resolve and ask selected individuals from around IT (Operations Managers, Developers, Business Analysts, Engineers, Architects, etc.) to come together and work in teams to identify solutions to the issues. This process has led to several breakthrough ideas within the organization that would not have been possible unless we had the cross-org teams assigned to working on the problem. We also use a process similar to this to help harvest new IP for IT to help Intel on it's mission.
Innovation is not easy. You have to have multiple approaches to how you are going to innovate. I’d be interested to hear what you are doing around IT innovation.
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