What do you do if your organization's IT Strategy is hindering innovation?

Assessing your current IT strategy involves a comprehensive review of its alignment with the organization’s overall goals and its adaptability to changing technological landscapes. This assessment should critically examine how the current strategy supports or limits the development and implementation of new technologies, and the degree to which it fosters a culture of innovation among employees. Furthermore, it's crucial to analyze the feedback from various stakeholders, including IT staff, end-users, and business leaders, to identify specific areas where the strategy may be overly restrictive or outdated, thereby pinpointing opportunities for enhancing agility and promoting innovation.

If your organization's IT strategy hampers innovation, scrutinize its current state. Evaluate alignment with business goals, adaptability to emerging technologies, and responsiveness to market dynamics. Embrace a culture of continuous improvement, fostering open dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders. Remember, innovation thrives in an environment that embraces change and experimentation.

Define why what is hindering, is it lack of adoption appetite or budget or some thing else. Consider it as a challenge where you can learn and grow to handle such situations. Nevertheless, hinderance at work should not stop you to stop your own learning process.

IT is a most important part in a industry. As an head of department you can see the day to day progress,evaluate it for making further plans and strategies to achieve the targets

Innovation should be part of the IT strategy to assure that the company is constantly looking for opportunities to keep or gain a competitive advantage. An agile mindset is key to fostering innovation. Here are some tips to develop an agile mindset in your organization: 1) Define the strategy. Select in which capabilities the organization will be best in class, or just follow competitors. 2) Set short-, medium-, and long-term objectives and goals. Don't forget to put customers and clients at the center of your strategy. 3) Create multifunctional agile teams that have clear objectives and goals. 4) Apply a test-and-learn approach. Every short interaction, check if you are going towards the objectives or if you need to pivot your strategy

Companies without an innovation process tend to easily blame IT strategy and perhaps the IT executives for the lack of inovation or its slow pace. Certainly innovation is driven today by technology but that doesn't mean IT (the organization) is fully and finnaly accountable for business innovation. By design IT strategy (as well as all other business strategies like HR strategy) MUST enable and sustain business innovation but accountability on innovation is reserved to the corporate innovation process.