This week’s reading entitled “Evaluating Emerging
Technologies, Innovations & Trends” focuses on how an EA practice can help
an organization better take advantage of new opportunities and provide more
value to its customers. These opportunities
come in many flavors. Opportunities can
include development of new products (business focus), updates to currently
offered ones (business focus), changing the company to provide these
new/updated products faster (organizational focus), reduction in cost to
produce products (IT/other focus), just to name a few. Some of these opportunities can be handled by
traditional IT groups, but many require a new approach. There are many approaches or models that can
be used, and all of these approaches are related to each other and affect each
other.
To me, one common theme stands out. That is the importance of how the people of
an organization themselves identify and execute innovation within the
organization. It is more about how
people approach innovation than about the details of the innovations
themselves.
Focus on people starts in the first article, “Foster
Innovation Within Your IT Operations Organization”. It makes very good points about challenges IT
faces with innovation efforts, many of which are normally ignored because they
are “in the weeds”. Some of the ideas
have been covered many times, the idea that IT is no longer the “only game in
town” for IT services and the lack of sandbox areas for IT staff to “try out”
new ideas for example. However, I was
very interested in the discussion of how financial incentives can actually work
against innovation in IT operations. Salaries
linked to frequent delivery without also including focus on innovation will
result in high focus on repeating the “way it has always been done” faster and
faster rather than taking some extra time to provide value added innovation was
novel to me. Also, I had not personally thought
about how the type of work done in IT Operations can also de-motivate
innovation. I view IT staff in general as
great sources of innovation as people, but as the paper pointed out, the
tedious nature of operations work can lead to staff falling into a rut and loosing
focus on innovation. The reference work “the
candle problem” shed further light on the subject for me. It suggested to me the benefits of “getting
out of your comfort zone” as a way to increase the likelihood of identifying
beneficial changes.
Looking further into the people aspect, in “Determining How
and Where Innovation Fits Into Your IT Strategy” makes additional good points
about how innovation in IT has to be focused on the people in the
organization. Innovation is not
something that can be just “bolted onto” strategy efforts, it has to be
incorporated into what everyone does in building the strategy. In addition, it is not just Technology, but
other aspects of the organization (managerial, business model, cultural, etc.)
are also innovation contributions IT can provide, which further emphasizes people.
I felt the article “Six Styles of Technology Innovation
Groups” is a good training opportunity for how to work with various
stakeholders making innovation happen. I
do disagree with the paper’s premise that a group should choose one style. It seems more to me the different styles are better
to be used in different situations, rather than an overall singular group overall
style. I can see using the Counselor
style when dealing with Executives and a Conductor style when working with a
group with innovation efforts underway and spread their innovation further and use
the scholar style when a new technology is identified that can provide
competitive advantage. I think it would
be counterproductive to follow only one style.
And finally, I have to admit I was inspired by the Atlassian
case study. My former tech-geek self developed
the urge to apply to work there.
However, I do believe this approach is a perfect case situation. I believe as the company becomes more
established in its market, it will be a challenge to maintain their high focus
on innovation.
