Creating a culture of innovation

Innovation is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days. Every organization is looking to innovate in one way or another. Be it new product development or business process, the drive to stay ahead of the market is always there.

At NTT Ltd. we’re lucky in that we’re part of an organization that puts innovation front and center. The NTT Group invests billions of dollars in research and development each year across areas including artificial intelligence (AI), networking and security.

The security field is entrepreneurial by nature, there’re around 17 distinct areas within the sector and no single dominant company. As the technology evolves, so new companies spring up to meet new needs. An example of this is how, as we’ve moved into the hybrid era, the role of the firewall as the first line of defense has changed, with services emerging to ensure that organizations can secure themselves across multiple environments.

An inclusive approach

A key challenge is separating out innovation from business as usual and making sure that each gets the attention it deserves. What I’ve learned over the past year is that when we bring more people into the process the speed and effectiveness of the outcomes improves. Sometimes we have dedicated teams working on long-term projects, but equally effective is spinning up a tiger team to target a specific issue. By taking this approach we’ve been able to accelerate critical projects, putting us months ahead of where I thought we would be. 

A big realization for me was that while we, as an executive team, were making the decisions that needed to be made, we weren’t always aware of the impact of these decisions on the wider organization. By expanding the range of people who were part of the decision making process, we arrived at better outcomes.

Being ready for the next evolution

A key innovation focus recently has been on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. This has allowed us to constantly monitor the data passing through our systems, identify anomalies and then act.

Another area of focus has been incident response. It doesn’t matter if you have the best systems for identifying threats, you need to be able to react quickly to address them. Before we needed to move our teams into a work from home mode as a result of COVID-19 our incident response processes relied heavily on personal interaction. We needed to move quickly to automate many of these processes, but our team had already established protocols for this, and we were able to quickly implement them and provide them to our clients.

For us it always comes down to being willing to break everything you have today to get a better outcome for our clients. The concept of disruption is a bit cliched, but the hard truth is that if we aren’t willing to make radical changes in the pursuit of better customer outcomes, they may choose to go elsewhere.  

Key to this is building the platforms that allow us to deliver a service to our clients, no matter what technology they choose to use. We don’t work in isolation, we work with other technology providers and our clients to create solutions that work for them. In order to provide value we need to be able to take the data generated by whatever systems our client has chosen and use that to create the insights needed to help them stay secure.

 It’s not a process that can be done in isolation, we have to understand and predict the needs of our clients and tailor our innovation strategy so that we can show them the next step in their continuing journey.