Here is an excerpt from an article written by Chris Murphy and published by InformationWeek magazine. To read the complete article, please click here.
This is how two tech leaders do it, and we’d like to hear more tactics from you.
It really isn’t ever going to stop, is it? You had that great idea. You aligned, crowdsourced, socialized, got buy-in, managed change, transformed … Name it, and you did what was needed to push from brainstorm idea to business success.
Time to do it again. Now what have you got?
We talk a lot about tech-driven innovation, but we should acknowledge that what IT and other business leaders want to do just isn’t natural. Yes, everyone wants to work on new and exciting projects. But then most normal people want to settle back into some steady state. People resist the notion of constant innovation, of constant disruption and change. We did that big-change thing. Aren’t we done?
It’s why CIOs need some process for innovation, some formal way not only to keep disruptive ideas coming, but to guide them safely through the gauntlet of ways companies can kill even great ideas.
[Gather more good ideas. See “6 Bright Ideas Found At A Tech Conference.” Please click here.]
Richard Thomas, the CIO of Quintiles, which provides services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies to help them run clinical trials, has a somewhat unusual way of keeping innovation in the pipeline. “We passionately believe in giving our ideas away,” Thomas said at the InformationWeek 500 Conference in September. (To watch the video of Thomas’ presentation, please click here.)
Thomas pushes his IT team to come up with what he calls “game changing” ideas: IT-powered new products that drive revenue, or process improvements that reduce costs significantly. Once IT has that great idea, however, Thomas looks for the right business unit to partner with and lets that business unit champion it and carry it forward.
For example, Quintiles has worked for three years on a project called Semio, with partner and customer Eli Lilly. Semio is a collaborative environment that pharma companies can use to examine healthcare data to design the best approach to a clinical trial, balancing the cost, time and chance for success. To develop that project, Thomas teamed his IT pros with Quintiles business unit experts and Eli Lilly experts; those business experts led three of the four technical development teams.
Giving away ideas isn’t always easy for ambitious IT folks to swallow. But Thomas doesn’t want to build a fiefdom of products that he and his IT team run on an ongoing basis. He’s creating an engine for producing those ideas and partnering with others to get them done.
If IT hands off projects once they’re built, that keeps a certain pressure on his team to come up with the next game-changing idea — and to stay in this world of constant change. “New IT is definitely not for everyone,” Thomas warned. “It’s a bit out there, and it’s not certain what it will look like when it’s finished, especially with some of these game-changing types of initiatives.”
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Chris Murphy is editor of InformationWeek magazine and Global CIO columnist on IT strategy issues. He has been covering technology leadership and strategy issues for InformationWeek since 1999. Before that, he was editor of the Budapest Business Journal, a business newspaper in Hungary; and a daily newspaper reporter in Michigan, where he covered everything from crime to the car industry. Murphy studied economics and journalism at Michigan State University, has an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia, and has passed the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exams.