What do you do if your organization is struggling to implement innovative IT strategies?

In my experience, most organizations try to include innovative ways of leveraging existing and emerging technology into their IT strategies. As technologists, we are predisposed to be creative and innovative, and organizations correlate competitive advantage with technological advantage. The challenge is how an organization implements innovation in an impactful and practical manner. I would suggest that leaders reevaluate the innovation effort's goal and expectations. Is the innovation agenda too ambitious? Is it misaligned or competing with other priorities? Where I have seen success is focusing on ‘micro-innovation,’ which is less focused on disruption but on incremental impacts that can drive increases in capability or efficiency.

In my experience, taking a business-first approach is vital when crafting an effective IT strategy. While tools like SWOT analysis and mission statements are valuable, they work best when supported by a cross-functional leadership team comprising business and IT leaders. By establishing a cohesive leadership team, strategic decisions can be made with a holistic perspective, promoting organizational alignment and support for the IT strategy. Conducting a gap analysis between the current situation and desired outcomes using Wardley Maps helps prioritize areas for improvement effectively. Evaluating the organization's readiness for innovation, including cultural readiness, resource availability, and leadership support, is crucial.

Determine if you are spending your time in the right places. Often innovation stagnates because teams are tied down in day-to-day tasks with little time to innovate. If this is the case and your team otherwise has the necessary skills, consider utilizing outside assistance to free up your team members or prioritizing their time accordingly; Everything can't be the most important thing. If your team has the time but lacks the skills or experience, focus on team augmentation with expertise that fills the skills gap until they can learn what is needed. In either case, setting a vision, goals and then organizing the team is critical to create an environment where innovation can flourish. Also consider what incentivizes innovation in your team.

Before you even start looking at an IT strategy, it is important to fully understand the long term and short term organizational strategy of the company. IT needs to understand it, which means the CIO should be able to understand where the company is headed. The Enterprise Architecture team needs to be clear on the current ground realities and visualize where the technology roadmap should head. Ofcourse, this is not done in isolation and the business teams need to support immensely. A defined strategy needs to be put in place, focussing on people, processes and technology. This strategy should include teams from both sides (business and IT). A 1 year, 3 year & 5 year approach always works, because it sets short-term and long-term goals.

IT is a business enabler. The fact that IT Innovation is not appealing to the organization masses only means either there is a lack of enablement or strategies not aligned to the business dynamics. In both these cases it is critical to identify the problem statement and quickly turn around with a clear plan of action to address.

Involving stakeholders across the organization, specifically the business teams, is critical. Organizational maturity and priorities are typical blockers to implementing or investing in change. You may know how to address and innovate to improve things, but do they agree that the problem you have identified is the most important? Find the common thread, then make sure you are all discussing the same thing. Agree is a great accelerator when it comes to innovation. You don't have to be right, you need to onboard and engaged. Provide options, be flexible, and ask for help.

Teams should never implement systems in isolation i.e. without business & IT sponsorship and participation. It leads to wastage of time, energy and focus. My experience tells me that when you show your business the benefits - tangible benefits e.g. manpower cost savings, or increased revenue or decreased cost, you are actually showing them value. Ideally both teams (business and technology) should also be knowledgeable in each other’s processes. Technology guys need to understand business processes, facts and figures and business people need to understand some level of technology. When they don’t understand each other’s work, they will challenge everything that comes along, thus slowing down the innovation process. Co-creation is the key.

Involving stakeholder is necessary as they need to be aware of the change as well as the benefits of it. Once they are convinced it will be much easier to implement IT policy.

Durch die effektive Einbindung von Stakeholdern in den Prozess der Entwicklung und Implementierung einer IT-Strategie k?nnen Unternehmen sicherstellen, dass ihre IT-Initiativen breite Unterstützung finden, eng auf die Gesch?ftsziele abgestimmt sind und einen realen Mehrwert für alle Beteiligten schaffen. Dieser inklusive Ansatz st?rkt nicht nur die Beziehung zu den Stakeholdern, sondern f?rdert auch Innovation und kontinuierliche Verbesserung innerhalb der IT-Strategie.

I also like to follow the Prosci methodology, and build cohorts with a carrot, leading with incentives to bring stakeholders along the journey

Invest in the right infrastructure to allow experimentation and change without impacting ongoing business activity. A Digital Business Platform empowers small, creative teams to explore solutions and iterate rapidly can accelerate this. Depending on context, this could mean anything from low-code platforms, drag-and-drop data pipelines and self-service analytics etc. The goal is to allow these teams to see and show results rapidly and learn every day.

There is no better proof for innovation than the paid proof of concept! In an exchange of good ideas with government stakeholders make sure they understand you are willing to stick your neck out and prove your innovation and skills are worthwhile. Explain to them the concept, the outcome,and the steps you are willing to take. Ensure they know what they are paying for in advance it should be clear the proof will be in the outcome. Finally, be reasonable and fair, and paid proof of concept should be motivated by next steps not a profit play. It is intended to prove your capability not solve a mission, that should and if you are successful will come later.

Hackathons, iterate-learn-move on!! I had an open conversation with one of the best managers I've had and asked him flat-out "I want to experiment on this, I will fail, but let me fail - I purposefully want to break the system", and without questioning me his response was "Ok Alex, go ahead, let's see you break it"...on that project, it turned out nothing broke and we were able to prove / advance on something that our team had been behind by more than a year. I passionately believe in Hackathons and "tinkering".

Experiment and learn. From my personal experience: You need to understand what you want in life, work and so on. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what exactly you want. So you need to doing different things in life, work for gain this experience. Also, it is a good Japanese methodology called ikigai. It is about balance in life and it helping to find what you really like in this life. However, I went deeper still and I worked with a psychologist/psychotherapist to understand what limiting beliefs I have and what I really want in life. Along with this, I have taken and am taking many self-development courses. And this helped me reach a new level of awareness and understand what I really want in this life and work. So, never give up :)

Everything can not be looked from ROI perspective when we are taking about innovation & experiments. Hence some portion of funds should be kept aside for this purpose. Encourage to fail only can bring great ideas.

Change in IT configuration is a prime cause of ICT problems and future unplanned outages. It inherently introduces risk. Have an agreed and clearly understood change management process. Ensure that all changes are documented for approval and stored in an agreed location. The first thing people should do when troubleshooting problems is to review the change log. Computers only do what they are told. If it was working and then stopped, someone or something has made a change to the system.

Change is not just IT change, it is also about preparing people for change. My experience tells that companies that have taken this lightly, have faced an uphill task to ensure easier adoption. In all my programs, I always have a dedicated team to focus on change. While it is important to follow an effective change strategy, it is equally important to have more people-centric processes e.g. have a day out with the business team. While taking them through the program & how you need them to support, make it fun. Enjoy a meal, play some games. Large programs need a lot of supporters. You need people who believe that this is important & needs to be done right. Humans tend to advocate about something when they have a "feel good" vibe about it.

Changing IT impacts the users. The implementation must be thoroughly tested and then rolled out for UAT and then user training.

1. Define clear biz objective of the it strategy . 2. Define what are KPI to indicate the impact of change using IT 3. Involve all key users of changed system in the rollout . Their buy in will smooth out deployment 4. Track the progress of the deployment to see what are roadblocks faced and fix them

Aqui é onde se deve dar bastante aten??o. Imagine a implementa??o da sua estratégia de TI como uma viagem de carro em uma nova rota. Tenha um mapa claro (plano de implementa??o) e marque pontos de verifica??o (monitoramento e medi??o de progresso). Prepare-se para imprevistos com um kit de emergência (gest?o de riscos) e tenha rotas alternativas em mente. Mantenha seus passageiros (stakeholders) informados e envolvidos durante a viagem, explicando mudan?as e o que esperar. Isso mantém todos calmos e alinhados com o objetivo. Assim, você minimiza surpresas desagradáveis e resistência, facilitando uma viagem tranquila e bem-sucedida para a nova estratégia de TI.

For an innovative IT strategy, review and improvement are ongoing. Regularly analyze data and feedback, evaluate impact, and adapt to change. Implement best practices and lessons learned to keep your strategy relevant and effective.

Feedback Mechanism: Establish a feedback mechanism to gather insights from stakeholders and team members about the effectiveness of the implemented strategies. Use this feedback to identify areas for improvement. Iterative Approach: Embrace an iterative approach to strategy implementation, allowing for ongoing refinement based on real-world feedback and changing circumstances. Continuous Learning: Encourage a culture of continuous learning and improvement within the organization, fostering an environment where team members are empowered to experiment, learn from failures, and adapt strategies accordingly.

Solicit feedback from important stakeholders, such as IT personnel, business leaders, end users, and customers. Their observations can provide useful information about what is working effectively and where improvements are required. Conduct a RCA to determine the underlying causes of any problems or obstacles encountered during IT strategy implementation. This could include reviewing project documentation, conducting interviews, or analyzing data to determine the core causes of difficulties. Ensure that your IT strategy remains aligned with the company's shifting needs and priorities. Regularly assess and update your IT strategy to reflect changes in market conditions, technological advancements, regulatory needs, and company goals.

Establishing KPIs to measure success, gathering feedback and making timely adjustments where necessary will keep interest live in innovation.

Our success is directly tied to us cultivating a positive digital culture within our organization. To achieve this, we must consider several key aspects: - Consistently communicate our goals and continuously addressing the 'What's in it for me' question for all stakeholders. - Incentivize participation and provide personalized training to meet individual needs. - Strike a balance between addressing current needs and aligning with future goals. - Continuously assess progress to ensure ongoing value creation. - Foster innovation and a sense of ownership among team members. - Encourage out-of-the-box thinking and create a safe environment for raising concerns. - Ensure alignment among different stakeholders involved in the initiative.

Interestingly non tech folks can actually give a more clear and balanced view of the right path to choose in terms of IT strategy . Reason being technology specialists focus too much on the technology itself and sort of fall in love with it rather than having an objective view . The user of the tech gives a fair non partisan view of it and why or why not it will work in terms of practicality . So business folks plus the tech folks should sit together and take a balanced view of applications vs ease of use sort of dilemmas . Implementation of technology for its own sake usually back fires

In my experience you need to make sure the whole organisation can see the benefit to them. It won’t happen unless everyone is invested in seeing the strategy become real. If you imagine everyone has a boat, some with fast engines and some with oars. The teams with oars aren’t going to row hard to the new destination (goal) unless they see intrinsic value to them. So make sure everyone has that energy and desire by showing what’s in it for them.

Innovate IT strategies fail mostly due to reluctance and lack of acceptance from team. Before implementing we have to take the team to our side explaining and comprehensively convincing them why that change is required and what benefit everyone will get. Till the time team feels the change is unnecessary and uncomfortable to them, no IT solution can succeed. Even big time IT implementations fail or take years to actually get implemented only due to this. Lot of times change is forced upon the team which has to be avoided.

Ownership at all levels is key. While its hard to get a the lower and middle tiers as excited about an IT implementation, it is those very tiers that can make or break and implementation. Project Managers should always strive to set aside time to interface with low to middle tiers to constantly gauge whether the value proposition is always relevant and communicated across the organization. The best insights and information I've found sometimes just comes from talking to call center agents (when deploying large scale enterprise level AI solutions at call centers) who are just happy to know their input will shape a solution that they are going to be users of.

The key thing to be aware of if your company is struggling to implement innovation is likely culture. Innovation thrives in environments that encourage creativity, calculated risk-taking, and open communication. Here's why culture matters: Fear of Failure: A culture that punishes mistakes can stifle new ideas. Silos and Bureaucracy: Information flow and collaboration are crucial for innovation, but rigid hierarchies and departmental divisions can hinder it. Lack of Resources: Innovation often requires dedicated time, budget, and resources, which might be lacking in a risk-averse culture. By focusing on building a culture that embraces these aspects, you can create a more fertile ground for innovation to flourish.