This is a classic battle or struggle: IT Spending vs. IT
Innovation.
If IT is a cost-center (as it often is), then it's about keeping
the spending down. How do we cut costs? How do we do more with less
(less = fewer servers, fewer people, less cost)?
If IT Innovation is important and a business driver, then we
need to spend money on it and ensure that we have enough IT to
deliver the innovation that we need. How do we get smart people in
here? How do we generate and prune better ideas? What's the best
way to extract the most money from these opportunities?
I saw a web ad today (from IBM) about this.
Sometimes ideas get stuck in IT because
they are innovative. If innovative doesn't have a bottom-line-item
attached to it, then it has a large risk of getting stuck (in most
companies). And if something is innovative, it may be hard to
attach a bottom-line item.
Google Engineer: "Presentations would be cool. We can import
Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets, but not PowerPoint. Let's do
that." Other Googler: "That'll cost money to build. How much will
we get in return?" GE: "I don't know. How would you put a dollar
value on that?"
I think this is part of the reason why companies have research
labs. If you need innovation, you open a research lab - because
it's hard to have a culture that both ensures measured results
(predictable) and innovation (chaos). You have a research lab that
isn't expected to produce anything useful or marketable (ok, it is,
but it's not held to that for every project attempt) and you can
drive innovation in that environment.
"People's side projects, the one's they follow because they are
interested, are often ones where you get the most value and
innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you
are most interested." -Some guy at Amazon (I pulled it from a discussion
about scaling Amazon)
I'd tent to agree with that. And yet "wandering" is hardly
predictable.
Off the top of my head: the computer mouse, the computer GUI
(Graphical User Interface: e.g. Windows), Microsoft Outlook Junk
E-Mail filter... all came out of research labs. Some of these
generated money for their parent companies, others did not. And
many, many projects fell by the wayside on the way to these
successes.
(Balance: Google's GMail, Facebook, and eBay came out of
"people's side projects and wanderings.")
Good (new) ideas come together with bad ones. And that is
inherently unpredictable. The only "safe" strategies that I am
familiar with are the research lab and venture capitalist. Research
lab = create suitable environment, stock with smart people, hope
for the best (sounds like a science experiment). VC = look at a lot
of options, pick the ones that look the best, invest in enough
options that you've covered your bases even when the majority
fail.
The VC strategy is really the side project & wandering
strategy. They find people who have launched side projects that
might have a chance of going somewhere. So much innovation (in our
North American economy anyways) comes out of new ventures where
there aren't rules about spending. The quote on HP before it
launched:
"Two you men who simply wanted to invent things.... Every garage
has its rules and so did this garage: Invent something useful.
Invent something significant."
If you want to watch this quote, it's in
a beautiful web marketing piece for HP by hillmancurtis. And
yes that garage
mentioned is the same famous HP garage that I mentioned
here.
This is something that I am just beginning to scratch the
surface on (mentally). But it triggered in my brain as one of those
"bigger issues" that needs addressing and a strategy for my own
work.