No matter what innovations your organization has decided to pursue, and regardless of the innovation strategy you’re following, there will always come a point where innovators need to deal with their information technology cousins.
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 is either a necessary evil that prevents innovative things getting done, or, alternatively, a huge force for competitive advantage and worker productivity. The perspective an innovator takes on the matter will vary depending on the way an IT organization does change on a day to day basis.
No matter how the information technology group is perceived, there is a key thing that those responsible for innovation will find impossible to avoid: the massive emphasis that most IT professionals will place on minimizing change. There are excellent reasons they do this, though it is obviously an anathema to innovators, whose whole role in life is to create productive, valuable change.
IT organizations will probably go so far as to have change teams, the purpose of which is to make it as hard as possible to change anything. They rationalize this with throw away lines such as “protecting service” and “up-time management”, and for those times when change is unavoidable, they ensure there are any number of gates and governance processes 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.
For more help with innovation management to support Information Technology, James Gardner has written an online innovation book, available free of charge as a resource to the community.
