**COVER STORY**
Lead photo: Alphaspirit.it, Shutterstock
A new word dominates the CIO agenda right now: acceleration.
CIOs are feeling the need for speed as their organizations seek to accelerate their digital transformations, time to market and development of new customer engagement channels.
There’s good reason for this focus on velocity: Leaders in enterprise technology who double down on their tech investments now grow five times faster than technology laggards, according to professional services firm Accenture.
Saideep Raj, senior managing director and innovation lead for strategy and consulting, Accenture
Accenture also found that organizations that compress their digital transformations grow four times faster than laggards, thereby making significant steps in closing the performance gap between themselves and the leaders.
“There is an acceleration going on here with CIOs around innovation, as the pandemic has been an enormous catalyst for change,” says Saideep Raj, senior managing director and innovation lead for strategy and consulting at Accenture. “At the same time, innovation has gone from a nice-to-have to a business-critical issue for operating in this new era.”
As a result, CIOs are finding ways to sustain continuous innovation at an increasingly fast pace. Here, innovation experts and disruptive IT leaders offer 10 ways to supercharge innovation.
Amy Radin, author of The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company
Innovation expert and author Amy Radin tells executives to identify the why behind their innovation efforts and then be sure their teams understand it, explaining that the why is the brand’s north star.
“Then you can structure your business innovation around that north star,” she says.
The organization’s vision shouldn’t be something too generic or overly vague, Radin explains. Nor should the why be about making more money or achieving more market share; those are the positive outcomes that come from successfully focusing on the company’s north star.
Rather, the why should speak to the company’s mission.
A retailer of outdoor products, for instance, may articulate its vision as getting more people to enjoy life outside, says Radin, an independent director, adviser and author of The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company.
“That then gives you a place to start looking for the opportunities you’re missing. That’s where the big breakthroughs are,” she adds.
Bernd Gross, CTO, Software AG
IT must not only broadcast its desire to innovate but prove that it can, says Software AG CTO Bernd Gross, who advises CIOs to rebrand IT as “a partner and an accelerator of innovation.”
That move is critical, even if the IT team is making giant strides in its own internal innovation capabilities, because IT can’t innovate alone. IT needs to partner with the other units within the organization, just as the other units need to leverage IT for their transformational ideas.
“There’s a mindset shift that’s needed in the whole organization,” Gross says, adding that CIOs should identify and showcase their “lighthouse cases”—IT-enabled innovation successes that deliver recognizable value to the company—to get everyone in the company to see IT as the company’s innovation engine.
Innovation leaders push for CIOs to get closer to their company’s customers so those CIOs can really understand what the customers want.
“You have to get outside the bounds of your own organization to interact with customers and other stakeholders in the market in a very good discovery process. Go listen to people and understand their context, not from the perspective of your product but what challenges are they facing,” Radin says, stressing that effective discovery shouldn’t be “about your products; it’s about their needs.”
Susan Gershman, chief customer innovation officer, Prophix Software
Susan Gershman, who as chief customer innovation officer at Prophix Software is tasked with knowing that customer perspective, says CIOs and their teams can get consumer insights by spending time on sales calls, with marketing focus groups, and in customer advisory board meetings. IT leaders can then use their newly found information about unmet customer needs to focus their ideation and innovation efforts.
As CIOs rev up their innovation capabilities, they should name what, exactly, they want to achieve, says Jackie Fenn, a distinguished vice president analyst and fellow emeritus in Garner's CIO Research group.
Jackie Fenn, distinguished vice president analyst and fellow emeritus, CIO Research Group, Gartner
CIOs should ask themselves: Do they want to move faster? Cultivate bigger and more transformational ideas? Enable innovation from more corners of the organization? Create a constant pipeline of innovation? All of those options?
“Being clear on those goals is important, because knowing your goals could lead you to tackle them in different ways,” says Fenn, who works with organizations to define and apply best practices in innovation.
She thinks of innovation not as one singular item but rather as a portfolio of objectives. For example, the portfolio could include short-, mid- and long-term goals, or it could include a mix of incremental and disruptive goals. She worked with an innovation team leader who broke down innovation efforts based on objectives, with 40% focused on quick wins, 30% on strategic ideas and 30% on ideas that bubble up from conversations with suppliers at industry events and the like.
The tech world for years has relied on hackathons to jumpstart ideation and innovation. IT and innovation leaders say they remain a valuable strategy today. But they also caution against holding hackathons that don’t have any defined targets.
Meerah Rajavel, CIO, Citrix
“I’m a big fan of hackathons; however, the one common mistake is not having a clear orientation with them,” says Citrix CIO Meerah Rajavel.
Yes, she says, it’s OK to hold events with no clear purpose and no boundaries sometimes; those can be powerful exercises that help flex tech, creative problem-solving and collaboration skills. But they rarely yield workable ideas.
She held one such hackathon five years ago, where the only directive was for her tech team to think about use cases for cloud computing. Rajavel says the event did get people thinking inventively about cloud and helped them learn some cloud computing skills, but she says she wouldn’t call the event a success. “It would have been better if I said, ‘Find business use cases to move to cloud for cost reduction, minimizing delivery time or increasing speed.’”
That’s the approach she took more recently, when she sponsored a hackathon to get ideas on increasing positive user experiences while also reducing response times for customers seeking help from the company’s service desk. “We had a clear problem; we gave guardrails on what we wanted to accomplish,” she says. As a result, the event yielded innovative ideas that can be put into production and deliver value to the company.
CIOs have long hired workers for their technical skills, as they should, but Radin says that’s not enough. They need to recruit people who have an innate intellectual curiosity and an interest in what their employers do, the customers they serve and the marketplace in general.
These individuals are more likely than others to engage in continuous learning, seek out different perspectives and develop new approaches to old problems.
“If you don’t have that intellectual curiosity on your team, it’s very hard to drive innovation in a way that’s persistent and sustainable,” Radin says.
Other IT and innovation leaders offer additional key traits needed on the tech team to spur innovation. Rajavel says she wants people who serve as advocates for the customer and what’s possible, as well as skeptics who can identify roadblocks to those possibilities and mediators who can think through those barriers.
Accenture's Raj talks about the four types of profiles for innovation: the catalyst, the “interpreneur,” the maker and the specialist. “CIOs who are purposeful about innovation are looking at how they build and attract those people,” Raj adds.
Innovation labs have their role, but effective leaders know how to enable, capture and advance innovative ideas regardless of their origins, says Will Poindexter, head of the Americas Enterprise Technology practice at Bain.
Will Poindexter, head of the Americas Enterprise Technology practice, Bain
“There’s this idea that innovation has to be centralized. Those labs are great for disruptive innovation and greenfield innovations,” Poindexter says. “But recognize that innovation can occur everywhere and that most innovation occurs from the core, the products you already have. And core innovation happens throughout the organization.”
Executives, including CIOs, know innovation is critical to long-term success. Yet they often let urgent needs push innovation work aside, Fenn says.
To avoid that, organizations should task someone with overseeing innovation. “Make it part of someone’s role to make sure you have the training and resources you need. Otherwise, you can get a surge of energy around innovation and then it kind of dies out,” she says.
Others agree, advocating that CIOs should create expectations for innovation for all their employees, finding ways to measure and reward workers for their innovation efforts.
They also recommend building innovation processes into the IT department so that innovation isn’t a project or an isolated task but rather part of the whole team’s ongoing work.
Frank DiGiammarino, executive vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton
“First, acknowledge that innovation isn’t a one-time event,” says Frank DiGiammarino, executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton. “A culture of innovation, a roadmap for innovation and the tools of innovation must be built into the broader organization’s day-to-day operations. The big risk here is to over-program innovation processes without the appropriate investment levels of funding, people’s time and leadership’s support to underpin it. This kind of environment won’t supercharge anything and will result in innovation burnout. Instead, teams—within the CIO’s purview and beyond—should be encouraged and incentivized to experiment, make a lot of bets and then see them through.”
Removing bottlenecks and roadblocks is another key to speeding up the pace of innovation, Raj says.
He points to his work with a life sciences company whose executives had been trying to cultivate an innovation mindset and sustain a healthy pace of innovation. The company had top-level support and bottom-up enthusiasm for innovation efforts, but an analysis found that middle management was a sticking point.
“The status quo was too easy for them to maintain,” Raj explains. “They were unable to translate the capabilities that digital transformation would produce in their own work context for their own duties and how they could apply innovation for the objectives that were set for them.”
The CIO and other company leaders tackled that by working with management to determine where and how innovation could benefit their functional areas, and how they could model an innovation mindset and support that in their teams.
Many companies turn to their own usual partners—the big service providers and their long-standing software vendors—to lend support to new initiatives. But the most transformative ones often seek out more, and more diverse, entities for inspiration, advice and skills, Poindexter says.
“Those who do this well are looking across that continuum of partnerships,” he adds.
Poindexter has seen companies partner with startups and venture communities, and he has seen some set up vendor innovation days to get potential projects off the ground. Such events can be particularly useful when thinking about how to develop something completely new based on emerging technologies, such as computer vision.
Others also advocate for casting a wide net.
“Examples of alternative operating models are everywhere in our daily lives. Airbnb didn’t try to find a better, cheaper or faster way to aggregate traditional lodging, like hotel rooms. Instead, they engaged nontraditional service providers (anyone with an extra room or home) to create a totally new recreation experience,” DiGiammarino says. “The takeaway for CIOs isn’t to let everyone into your organization, but instead to think creatively about who could be the nontraditional service providers in your business and to engage them broadly to create new ways to solve pressing problems and deliver a completely transformed user experience.”
