Andrew McAfee is a professor at the Harvard Business School, and he writes some interesting things in his blog about his research and thoughts on the new dynamics of the enterprise. In his latest blog entry, he talked about some of the research behind a new paper he co-authored about how IT is a driver of competition among companies in the same industry. That blog entry and that paper are what got my thoughts going.

We are painting the house this week which means I probably will not have time to make a full entry. However I do want to offer you one piece of content to perhaps inspire you and your creativity. In case you don't know what TED is, imagine a place for lots of smart people get together and share their ideas. These ideas are not just the obvious but offer new perspectives on a lot of different subjects. They have started releasing presentations made for TED online, and many of them are quite powerful.

One of the things that comes up in tech transfer and in IT all the time is whether something is a good idea or whether it is truly innovative. A podcast I listen to is called "Killer Innovations" from Phil McKinney, and his podcast focuses on an innovation process he has developed over the years. One of the steps in the process he uses involves asking a lot of tough questions about the idea on the table. He has created a set of questions that he uses at HP, and I think the same thing can be done for IT. If an idea does not seem to hold up under the questions, then obviously it needs more work. With a little brainstorming, I came up with these questions.

1. What user complaint or obstacle does this idea address?
2. What are the obvious benefits to users who adopt this idea?
3. What pain that users don't know about will this idea address?
4. What benefits does this option offer over other solutions?
5. What changes will this solution require in user behavior to be considered successful?
6. What impact does this solution have on other systems?
7. How will this solution increase revenue or decrease costs?
8. What organizational goal is this solution going to help accomplish?

These are just a few when you are trying to examine innovative ideas for internal IT services. Thinking about your ideas with these questions will help you understand the real benefits and issues that may face your solution. If you think about these things before you start talking to others in your organization about the idea, you will have the answers to questions that they are likely to ask.

If you haven't heard of Drupal, you probably don't deal much with web development. Drupal is the rising star in the open source field with an ever-growing installed base as a very powerful content management system (CMS). Drupal is a website content management system that really allows you to rapidly create a prototype for your innovative web idea. How does it do that? A very active community with hundreds of modules for about every functionality you can imagine.

A couple years ago, my wife and I had an idea for a website community centered around women who play games - computer games, board games, card games, role-playing games, etc. We kind of had an idea for what we wanted the site to do, but we were not really certain of all the details. In the course of investigating the CMS options out there, I came across a product I had not encountered before in Drupal.

After installing Drupal, we would often have conversations like this:

"What do you think about having users vote on whether content appears on the home page?"
"Sounds great. Let me check the Drupal site for a module."
"Hey, there's a module for that, and I just spent five minutes downloading and installing it."
"Wow, I just took a bit of time to play with it a bit, and that does exactly what we want."

The same conversation happened for a user points system, for personal messaging, for blog support, and on and on. The bulk of the work ended up being in design with configuration tweaking somewhat less time. In other words, we were able to focus on the capabilities we wanted and quickly try out existing modules to see if they met our needs.

Out of the box, Drupal supports a lot of different things, and it really lets you build a website quickly and easily. If your website is primarily static content, you can spend your time working on the content. If your website is primarily functionality, you can spend your time searching the community for modules or writing your own. Being written in PHP with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database (though the latter might have some issues in some modules), it is a pretty standard open source development environment. Unlike a lot of commercial products out there, that means Drupal can get you up and running really quickly while providing limitless capabilities to customize the functionality your site provides. As a tool, Drupal both enables rapid prototype development for innovative ideas without forcing you to start over when you decide to take the next step.

Just in case you aren't sold yet on at least looking into Drupal for developing your new site, maybe you'll be sold by the fact that some very busy and popular sites use it for their content management system.

• Popular Science
• Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
• MTV UK
• The Onion

Colin Stewart at the Orange County Register has compiled eleven lessons that Blizzard has learned by being innovative with its products. In case you have not heard of them, Blizzard is the company that has created a number of the best selling computer games in the last 10 years including World of Warcraft. The article itself has a couple inaccuracies in terms of Blizzard's and computer gaming history, but it has some useful points. Read the article if you'd like to see them all, but there are a couple that particularly stood out for me.

The importance of frequent failures
Larger organizations with a lot of cash on hand have a bit more flexibility, but smaller organizations can still take a grain of truth away from this. The point is that if you are trying to be really innovative, not every idea is going to pan out. As long as you learn something though, the investment of money and time is not wasted. In smaller organizations, following an iterative approach is one way to take risks without investing too much in a single idea all at once. The next concept addresses that.

Move quickly, in pieces
Blizzard uses a prototyping development approach that allows them to be flexible in the features they add to World of Warcraft. They develop the features that users ask for rather than doing long, full waterfall-style development cycles that include extended requirements gathering and project planning. That does not mean though that you can just fly by the seat of your pants. You just do shorter term planning that can be implemented in weeks rather than months or years.

Demand excellence or you'll get mediocrity
In a way, you have to trust the work ethic and skills of your team a lot more when you don't use the full software development life cycle. There is a lot more judgment that needs to happen in a rapid development in terms of priorities and specific tasks. The concept of excellence also applies to the end product. If your end result is not excellent, then you really did not gain much from your innovation other than time. While time can be useful, it does not mean much in the IT field because so many things are imitable given enough time.

Offer employees something extra
Part of Blizzard's success comes from getting its employees excited about their work. While there are many IT jobs that are not perceived to be as glamorous as being a game programmer, there are still things that you can do to motivate your employees. IT workers are in a very intellectual field, and if you can give them an opportunity to flex their brain power, you can often get real excitement out of them. That is why I am putting an innovation budget into my budgets this year. By offering an opportunity for my staff to be really creative, I think they will be even more excited about their work than they would be normally.

Forgive the title, but I guess I was feeling a bit inspired by the IBM commercials that depict companies deciding they need to innovate more but having really poor ways of going about it. That's a bit how I feel at the moment, likely due to a long day of walking the streets and buildings of Chicago. One way to get inspired for innovation is to look for innovative ideas around you. Here are a couple things I encountered today that I found particularly interesting, perhaps not necessarily innovative.

foodlife - foodlife is a set of restaurants that are gated off from the rest of the stores at Water Tower, a massive shopping center on the Magnificent Mile. They market themselves as "not a food court" and offer a variety of food styles at counters spread around the middle - Chinese, pasta, pizza, Tex-Mex, Thai, and one called "Comfort Food" are among the options. When you are seated, you are given a magnetic swipe card. When you get a food from one of the various counters, you give them your swipe card rather than paying. Once you are done eating, you leave and have your cards read to determine your amount due. This could be potentially innovative if all of the main dishes you could order did not cost as much as a whole serving. They try to inspire you to try all sorts of different foods, but even trying two would likely run you over $15 and get you tons of leftovers. In other words, it's a food court that is marketed to not be a food court. While I give the marketing a good grade, they didn't fool me. The only benefit is for people to avoid having to pay every single food court restaurant individually.

iPod skin kiosk - Since I do not frequent shopping malls more than a few times a year, it is possible I just missed this one before now. While wandering around, we came across a kiosk selling skins for iPods of all sorts - Nanos, Videos, Touches, everything. Not counting the likely high rent costs, this was a pretty good implementation of an impulse purchase offering. The packaging was completely white with the exception of the skin to avoid distracting from the design. I can't imagine the production and packaging costs are very high which means they probably have pretty high margins for capitalizing on the success of another company's product. The most interesting thing though? While paying for my impulse purchases (yes, I couldn't resist giving my iPod a new look), I noticed an IM window that seemed to be a discussion with other iPod skin kiosks at other malls in the Chicago area. There were congratulations being passed back and forth, but I could not tell what they were for. Kiosk work is pretty lonely from the few people I have known who have done it, so making IM available to at least communicate with other locations could be both motivating and a potentially prevent boredom.

In the end though, marketing is really what took these two seemingly obvious ideas and turned them into something immensely popular. Even the glorified food court was extremely busy well after 1:30 in the afternoon. Isn't that what IBM is trying to do with regard to innovation? Instead of talking about how to innovate, the trick is to just do it. Truly innovative ideas come from the people in the trenches whether they know they are being creative or not. One of the best ways I have found to get the process going is to ask a simple question: "What's the biggest headache of your job these days?" A simple question that can lead to a lot of discussion and eventually some creative IT-driven solutions.

With about a year to go on my Master's in MIS degree, I have started to plan my thesis. While I was thinking one morning about Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory for human resource management, I began to think about whether there were things that IT managers can do to impact their relationship with organizational leaders in terms of satisfaction and innovation. For example, if the email system is consistently off-line or is buggy, management is likely to be dissatisfied with how their IT services are operating and are unlikely to give funding and support for projects that do not directly address that issue. For my thesis, I have decided to take this concept and build a set of guidelines for IT leaders and organizational leaders. To narrow the research, I decided to focus my thesis on higher education.

While doing a literature search for coverage of the topic, I came across an study from EDUCAUSE, an organization focused on IT in higher education. The study was a snapshot of IT leadership in higher education published in 2004, so it is pretty current as far as academic research is concerned. Some of the significant parts of the study covered innovation and IT effectiveness within higher education, and so it has several insights useful for my thesis and for my career. Perhaps the most interesting is that IT leaders feel that the components necessary for innovation, such as transformational leadership, are in place, but they feel that there is little innovation that receives support.

I can see where there might be a possible explanation for this disconnect between having an innovative environment and being able to be innovative with higher education IT management. The reason might be from a difference of opinion of what innovation actually means. To most IT workers who are interested in innovation such as myself, innovation is the "fun" side of IT management where we come up with ideas and systems using new technologies that impact the operations of the organization we support. However in an organization that is far behind on the scale of adopter categories, basic services such as share calendaring for staff or high capacity data storage for researchers could potentially be innovative. Adopter categories are part of the Diffusion of Innovations theory by Everett Rogers. For an organization that is not at the front of the adopter category curve, improving basic teaching support systems may be the type of innovation they need rather than implementing a high-end SAN to support the terabytes of data generated from research.

So while it is possible to elicit the responses that determine whether an organization is conducive to innovation, the services that IT workers see as innovative may not be getting support and hence make them believe their organization does not support innovation. The organization is simply continuing with its normal pace of adopting innovations while IT workers feel like the environment is stagnant. This disconnect between the meaning of innovation might be the cause for the EDUCAUSE study's innovation issue, and perhaps I will find additional data to support my belief in my research.

Can you foster innovation by using a process, or are the concepts of "process" and "innovation" antithetical to each other? With innovation, you have to do a lot of thinking "outside the box," and processes can make thinking outside the box difficult or restrictive. The trick then is to define a process that helps move innovation along from idea to full implementation without being stifling. If you are struggling with getting your organization to accept innovative ideas or the concept of innovation driven by IT, it might be possible to get some buy-in by defining a process.

CIO magazine recently had an article about the innovation process used at Proctor & Gamble. P&G uses a process they call SIMPL which stands for Simplified Initiative Management and Product Launch (see chart). This process uses some of the concepts of the prototyping software development method where software is developed and implemented on an incremental and trial basis. Rather than spending a year on a new project developing requirements, planning the project, doing the work, and implementing the solution as a whole, the project is approached piecemeal.

In the SIMPL process, there are six main parts to the innovation process - Discover, Design, Qualify, Ready, Launch, and Leverage. These can be useful for any IT organization wanting to stay ahead of the curve rather than lagging behind the competition or their own IT peers. In the Discover stage, new opportunities and ideas are generated. At the same time, there might be some work to begin the creation of a pilot program to test out aspects of the idea. Developing and testing the pilot transitions the project from the Discover phase, through the Design phase, and into the Qualify phase. The Qualify phase is largely used to test out the pilot project to see whether it is actually capable of having an impact and whether it should be rolled out on a larger scale.

During every part of the project from Discovery to Qualification, the project may go back to a previous stage for more work, more idea development, or more testing. However, once the project has Qualified for being rolled out as a new initiative to the whole user base, it goes into the Ready phase. When the project is fully Ready, it goes into Launch mode on a larger scale. One key aspect for IT projects that the SIMPL method uses is Leveraging the project for other purposes. Especially with the growth of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture, it becomes possible to Leverage the innovation into new opportunities or for other innovations.

In the real world, it is important to be able to talk the talk that business leaders want to hear. Asking business leaders to allow IT to play a role in an organization's innovation can be difficult if IT has a historical role of providing basic services to keep the lights on. By setting a process, business leaders can have something to see how IT can provide product and service innovations. Not only can a process like SIMPL or non-waterfall IT project approach help when dealing with business, it also helps IT avoid sinking lots of money into bad projects.

Recently I was asked by a coworker if there was a way for him to do an online presentation involving a number of people spread around the country and maybe even a few in Europe. After a bit of thought, WebEx came to mind as a possible application to use since I had been in some seminars with it previously and had had good experiences. After sitting in on a couple demos and doing a trial run ourselves, we decided to give it a shot for the meeting. It worked so easily and so well, we decided to use it again for a follow-up meeting. By that point, the marketing person and I were convinced that this would be a good service for us to have that could be used for meetings like these, monthly marketing events, staff meetings, or even tech support. I contacted a sales rep, and we started discussing pricing. I've now recommended to the directors of the two departments I work with that we go ahead and get a contract.

That might seem like it took a bit of time, but that whole process actually spans the course of less than 3 weeks. The innovator in me really enjoys this type of idea that comes along, is easy to test out, and is easy to implement. The part of me that tries to be more thoughtful and spend more time doing analysis cringes a bit at moving this quickly.

Having these sorts of inspirations, innovations, and ideas come along that can quickly have a positive impact on your organization is really invigorating. It gives a fast sense of accomplishment, and it helps build your credibility for future projects that require the investment of resources. Building that trust from management is a key to getting budgetary and staffing support that goes beyond the basics of IT services like user machines and network infrastructure.

There are risks though to rapidly adopting technology change. For one, you risk going too fast for your users to adopt. Some users will adopt new technology quickly while others will only use it if they absolutely have to use it. There is also the risk that what seems like the obvious choice initially may not be the correct choice in the long run. Part of reducing risk is being able to do research rapidly while also being able to adapt to make a technology more usable.

Rapid technology adoption should follow a shorter cycle that is sometimes associated with agile software development. In agile software development models, development completely cycles in shorter time spans to incrementally build an application. Instead of designing, programming, testing, and implementing an application over the course of a year, the same cycle is done on portions of the application in increments that might be weeks long. Over time, the application is built and improved while getting continuous feedback from users on what should go into the next cycle's development. In the same way, new technologies can be tested and implemented in an organization to go from a small-scale implementation into something enterprise-wide.

Rapid technology adoption can be very valuable and effective, but it is never a decision that you should make and walk away. Rapid technology adoption requires review after initial implementation to make sure that the technology is being used effectively and appropriately before it is expanded further into the organization. To get some ideas on how to do rapid technology adoption wisely, reading up on agile software development is a good place to start.

Christopher Koch writes a blog for CIO magazine that usually has some good ideas in it. One part of a recent entry struck me, and I added my own input.

Think of information as food and think of the business as starving and think of IT as controlling who gets the food. Now you can see why there's so much emotion in the relationship [between IT and business in an organization].
- Koch's IT Strategy, Go Ape

I've been in a handful of small organizations and worked within IT in a variety of ways, and it can be difficult to rebuild a good relationship between IT and business when things have been sour. If information is the food of the apes in an organization, I can see where IT can improve the relationship by giving business better and more useful information. In my organization, management and users are always more impressed with access to new information or information presented in better ways than they are impressed with new technology alone. When IT pulls back into its corner and business's only experience with IT is when IT is snippy about a problem that business has caused or wants resolved, business sees IT has keeping things hidden and making it seem as though IT is somehow magical and not possible for business to understand. Being open with business while providing avenues to access information is what will win the hearts and minds of the people in the business side of an organization.

It's a rather basic view of how to do IT well, but I think it holds some wisdom for how to approach IT management.