Those who need to innovate are often the very organisations whose structures make innovation difficult. This innovation paradox comes up time and again.
Recently I was gobsmacked by an article on how IT was critical in helping deliver growth to large Australian banks. The CEO of a major financial services company took an incredibly dismissive perspective saying that IT was unlikely to create “genuine competitive advantage” for banks.
How many sources of genuine competitive advantage from technology have you seen any big bank create in the last 20 years? I can’t think of many – I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Bear in mind that the bank in question, according to the article, had moved IT down the reporting chain and done little to discourage a string of senior IT departures.
Compare this to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. CommBank CIO Michael Harte reports directly to the CEO. That tight coupling of IT and overall strategy has led to a reported $1 billion core banking upgrade over the past five years. Add to this the fact that the CommBank CEO Ian Narev calls IT the first of four key pillars that will drive commercial success for the bank and you have a stark contrast to the “no competitive advantage” position.
While it would be easy to look at this situation as something purely relating to banking, this dichotomy exists across other traditional industries. Name a legacy vertical – manufacturing, mining, telcos or airlines, and we see examples of progressive organisations using IT transformation to deliver real competitive differentiation. Sadly we also see organisation that consider IT to be simply about “keeping the lights on”.
So how do you keep innovating, even as your business grows larger? And how can IT leaders receive a mandate to do more than just keep the lights on? Here’s a list of actions that can be taken to ensure agility from within, and give the best shot of gaining outside buy-in for innovation:
- Understand the core strategy of the business and discuss how IT can directly deliver that strategy
- Talk to other business leaders about improving productivity rather than locking them down with compliance
- Consider building a “black ops” team tasked with delivering agile “quick win” technology solutions
- Embrace systems that facilitate collaboration, within the IT team but also across different business units
- Look for ways to give employees the ability to set up their own IT needs
We need to be realistic here and acknowledge that change won’t happen overnight and won’t be quite as broad as the more revolutionary among us would like. But just as the actions of a few individuals created a groundswell that led to the Arab Spring, so can a handful of IT practitioners within the most conservative of organisations create an avenue for change.
A version of this post was first published on the Salesforce.com/au blog and was written by Ben Kepes, technology evangelist and author of the Diversity.net.nz blog. It is part of the Future of Work series sponsored by Salesforce.com.
