How to go beyond?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. A lot depends on the current and projected status of IT – both software and hardware. Also on how the functions are arranged together with the staff and the system of incentives. The last point receives no mention let alone a discussion in the literature on innovation.

One of the problems is that there has not been a truly flexible software, which can be infrastructure agnostic. The lumpiness of software sometimes discourages decision makers from nodding their heads in favour for new investments. It is a no-brainer that the largest portion of budgets will be reserved for catering to smooth flow of operations. Any innovation has to come from without, which may create organizational problems of its own but we will come to that in a while. One of the most fruitful ways of going beyond is to recognize that there are innovations and innovations. Unfortunately, even since the term ‘disruptive innovation’ (as against sustaining innovation) crept into every day usage, it has adversely affected expectations of employees and senior management. There has to be an environment of encouragement for any innovation as long as it has value for a business – be it in process improvement, product enhancement or new product development. If supported by an appropriate system of incentives, this could create a positive environment that reinforces itself. Any such “Greenfield project” should follow different metrics however difficult it may to me measure, principally focusing on their impact on customers’ performance.

Change the orientation

‘I don’t deal with “IT”, I deal with Information Systems’, was a comment from an IS professional, who added that if the whole of the IT World understood that is what we dealt with, the quicker the rest of the business world will come to grips with understanding what really drives business. Filippo Passerini, CIO of P&G in 2004 and head of its global business services business unit, outsourced commodity functions, improved transactional data systems, and renamed IT “Information and Decision Solutions” or IDS. Now, all companies may not outsource all ‘commodity functions’ but that is beside the point. Information and Decision solutions does not just have a nice ring to it; it calls for a complete reorientation. It is a call to embrace problem-solving approach and discard the defensive, empire-building syndrome that has characterized many companies. Much of the criticism of the Business Intelligence (BI) software was precisely this – that it gobbled up most of the budgets towards its infrastructure with little left to create the intelligence, prompting many companies to turn to tools and techniques rather than mammoth systems, which become an end in themselves. As a facilitating function, IT is a means to an end which screams ‘Work has an external face’. Technology opens up possibilities: exploiting them is a human choice. Gary Loveman, once a Harvard Professor and the CEO of Harra’s, one of the world’s largest casino companies confessed: “The constraint on us at the moment is not the technology, it is the quality of people who are using the technology”.

Takeaways

The principal task of any enterprise IT is help business operations

The reality of multiple systems responding to specific needs

Pressure on enterprise IT to ease day to day operations is immense

Little time and mind space for innovation

Image by Pablo Ibañez from Pixabay