davidjf

Ultimate and permanent challenge for people, companies, societies is to innovate (to survive?)

This week, a lot of point of view on this topic, re-emphasizing some basic evident ideas:

First, innovation in IT is often nowadays coming from "transgressive renegades".

Continuous flow of new emerging technologies allows permanently unsatisfied end-user to invent their way.

A good IT department must consider/absorb these innovations, considered as valid prototypes, and to transform them into reliable professional solid applications...

This idea is not far from the need, for organizations who want to adapt and change, to capitalize on "change agents" (This way is the only way! Organizations, closed in their today's paradigm, cannot event imagine the methods of to-morrow. Fortunately, some people, these change agents, are already in to-morrow's paradigm....)

Not far too from this idea is the search of "bumpy bits"

If the world is flat, seek out the bumpy bits, in an aligned, flat world....

But innovation must be highly stimulated by collaboration, toward collective creativity. That is a new key mission for CIOs...

Some people can think there is a conflict then between IT Governance (driving to a flat aligned world?) and creativity stimulation (subversive guys...). Good debate, where opinions (and experiences) are mixed...

Informal network concept, illustrated by 1993 famous article "The Company Behind the Chart" in Harvard Business Review, still the key condition, following Booz-Allen-Hamilton, for collective creativity.

Some french thinking now...

Les universités, lieu d'innovation, devraient quant à elles être en pointe. Mais...

Le budget de R&D de la Chine, dont les grandes universités s'inspirent du MIT ou de Stanford, va dépasser celui du Japon... qui achève une réforme sans précédent de ses universités... tandis que l'université de Cambridge investit dans des « hedge funds » pour ses placements !!!

Why did I focus on Innovation this week? Just because a friend of mine sent me a personality test, to check if I was really a "strategist" (my official title on my business card...). And guess what? I am not a "strategist", but an "innovator" !!! And you?

Good News: Knowledge Management still alive.

In spite of vendors appropriation of KM logo ( just type "Knowledge Management" on Google and you will find 90% of the connected sites are selling something, products, tools, consulting, ....), fundamentals of KM are surviving.

Recent contributions:

- Relation of KM with semantic web and web2 (with this permanent problem of the balance between "coding the world" and creativity freedom!). See too that nice reaction on this topic

- Thoughts about economy of Knowledge, stimulating contributions and co

- and, and, and, and, and ....

If you want to follow periodically the trends in KM (or anything else!), a good way is to use Google alert , to receive information in your mailbox...

Try too, through Google labs, to see that KM queries are nowadays

- less "fashion" than 3 years before (because we know enough about fundamentals?)

- that queries are mainly done now by far east and emerging countries (does that mean that they discover now the concepts, or that innovation by knowledge will come more and more from this part of the world?)

A lot of informations recently published on this theme.

What are the "new" issues and opportunities for CIO's ?

Let's take a quote from this one

Ovum analysts say in their Summit Seven predictions. "Virtualization, service-oriented architecture, management automation and integrated workflow tools will increasingly be coupled with externally provided software-as-a-service (SaaS), utility computing, business process outsourcing and other network-hosted applications and business services to create highly dynamic enterprise service delivery environments."

Not a bad list! but so many challenges inside! Just to take an example, SOA not so easy, and the article warns on that.

(for those who are not SOA experts, a good recent synthesis there)

See too the feelings of James Champy, ex reengineering guru: IT budget growth, but under control, lack of professional talents, offshoring still on, no technological revolution...

And McKinsey view: SOA and Lean production...

I like too the personal analysis of JP Corniou in his blog (e-voeux 2007), reemphasizing some challenges like level of CIO within organizations, need to prove continuously the value generated by IT, challenges of standards for IT, outsourcing and offshoring decisions, cultural and educational aspects, ...

Determine too what kind of CIO you are (business leader, innovation agent, operational expert, turnaround artist) in this nice report with quiz and ...look at global statistical results!

Look at this nice contribution, insisting on the fact processes are first and IT projects are just after.

The last sentences about Toyota sounds nice !

but....

all that concerns organization improvement and optimization.

What about innovations coming from synergy between:

creative new ideas of new services + use of emerging technologies to protect these ideas ?