The CIO challenge in 2007: Innovate but spend less money – suggestions welcome!

According to a sneak preview of CIO magazine’s annual state of “State of the CIO” survey the challenge is

“Innovate and grow [the business], but be very buttoned down when it comes to costs, risks, security and regulatory compliance.”

Also quoted in the article is Gartner CEO Gene Hall who says:

“many CEOs believe that their CIO is [too] cost-focused and not capable of contributing to growth—and they need IT to contribute to growth”

It sounds a little like the old “work smarter, not harder” approach is the only way out of the double squeeze to deliver more with less. So how can CIOs regain the innovation habit that might have been stamped out while cost cutting was the only virtue. Well here are three quick ideas on how to simultaneously innovate and spend less money:

Obviously, SOA is a key candidate as Steve points out: SOA is an architecture which supports software as a service/service outsourcing (i.e. reduces costs) and also increases internal agility (i.e. increases agility and hence supports growth).

Something that may sound a little surprising when first raised is investing in hardware upgrades . Not only will this increase the processing power available, more importantly it will reduce the power bill by phasing out old power hungry machines.

I would also look at some of the Web2.0 technologies and in particular wikis. While they may be less sexy than the horribly named “enterprise mash-ups”, the technology is more mature and provides an excellent way of simultaneously reducing the volume of email flowing around with yet another updated project plan attached and increasing collaboration within the organisation and where there is collaboration, there is innovation.

Any other suggestions?  Comments welcome - as always.

Ronan

Comments

[Steve Craggs]

I have to comment on the last point, about looking to Web 2.0. Am I the only person that thinks Web 2.0 is really flaky? I suppose I have relatively little to do with it, but I know that things like trackbacks and blog content consolidators seem pretty hit and miss to me.

Steve

[John Schmidt]

The topic on innovating with less money suggests a tight dependency between these two ideas. I disagree. There are many examples of innovation occuring in environments that were cash-strapped - in the fact difficult financial times can spawn new ideas out of necessity.

A couple of more important factors in driving innovation is to create an information-rich environment and a culture that celebrates failure. If you want people to innovate, you have to provide them with the context in which to innovate by giving them information. All kinds of information like budgets, investment plans, staffing plans, competitive insights, etc. Some organizations have cultures where this information is closely guarded by the department that creates it - this is a great way to prevent innovation - it basically tells people to "don't think - shut up and do your job".

The second cultural driver for innovation is one where failure is celebrated. I don't mean have a party when something goes wrong, instead, celebrate by having a post-mortem of the failed project, capture the lessons learned, codify them, and disseminate them to the broadest possible audience. If you want to innovate you have to experiment. Some experiments will fail - but if you learn from them, then you could view 100% of the experiments as successful.

John