Helping It Innovate

Regardless of the innovation strategy your organization has adopted

, and no matter what kind of innovations you have decided to pursue, you will almost always have to deal with information technology professionals at some time during the process.

Technology is, without a doubt, at the center of production and productivity in most industries, from those which are dominated by industrial age economics, to the emerging innovation economy companies that are presently taking the lead.

Because of this, information technology may either be considered a necessary evil preventing getting things done, or alternatively, a huge enabler of competitive advantage and worker productivity. Your perspective will likely depend on the way in which your IT organization deals with change on a daily basis.

Regardless of the way you perceive your technology group, there is one key thing that innovation teams will find impossible to avoid: the extreme emphasis that most IT groups place on minimizing change. There are good reasons for this behavior, though it is an anathema to innovators, whose whole role is to create productive, valuable change.

IT organizations will likely have change teams, in fact, whose purpose is to make it as hard as possible to change anything. They rationalize this using throw away lines such as "up-time is our number one priority" or "protecting service". For those times when they are unable to get out of making a change, they will ensure there are any number of gates and governance processes that are designed to make things as difficult as possible. As difficult as possible, at least, for the innovators.

Innovation teams have an answer in a disciplined focus of the rigors of Innovation Management. They provide a positive way to manage technologists in an organization, because they create a set of tools and processes that demonstrate value to technologists as well as innovators. They enable the team to show that change is in the best interests of the organization, and, more often than not, in the interests of IT as well.

by: James A Gardner

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