“Want Fries with That?”
Blog: Form Follows Function
Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts about architecture, innovation, and organizations as systems (a list of previous posts can be found at the bottom of the page) for quite a while now. His latest, “Technology permeats innovation”, touches on an important point – the need for IT to add value and not just act as an order taker.
It’s funny how this series of innovation posts keeps taking me back to posts from the early days of this blog. In my last post, “Accidental Innovation?”, I referred to my very first post, “Like it or not, you have an architecture (in fact, you may have several)”. Less than a month after that first post, I published “Adding Value”, which had the exact same theme as Greger’s post: blindly following orders without adding value (in the form of technical expertise) is not serving your customer. In fact, failing to bring up concerns is both unprofessional and unethical. Acceding to a request that you know will harm your customer without pushing back is tantamount to sabotage.
Innovation involves multiple disciplines. In a recent tweet, Brenda Michelson illustrated this important truth in the context of digital technology:
Both Brenda and Greger make the same point – successful innovation is a team effort. In fact, using Scott Berkun’s definition of the word, it’s redundant to say “successful innovation”:
If you must use the word, here is the best definition: Innovation is significant positive change. It’s a result. It’s an outcome. It’s something you work towards achieving on a project. If you are successful at solving important problems, peers you respect will call your work innovative and you an innovator. Let them choose the word.
In a recent series of post, Casimir Artmann noted that innovation comes in many forms: improving existing products, developing new products, and finding better ways to work. Often, as shown in examples of innovation in music, photography, and telephony, innovation comes from a combination of these forms. He sums it up this way:
Regardless if we talk about innovation for existing products, new products or new ways of working, inventions in technology is one of the drivers.
Internet of Things, Cloud, Autonomous devices, Wearables, Big Data etc, are all enablers for innovation in the organisations. The challenge is to find out the benefit our clients customers will have from these technology enablers.
Meeting that challenge requires integrating the expertise of both business and IT. Innovation and value aren’t picked from a menu and served up at a drive-through.
Previous posts in this series:
- “We Deliver Decisions (Who Needs Architects?)” – I discussed how the practice of software architecture involved decision-making. It combines analysis with the need for situational awareness to deal with the emergent factors and avoiding cognitive biases.
- “Serendipity with Woody Zuill” – Greger pointed me to a short video of him and Woody Zuill discussing serendipity in software development.
- “Fixing IT – Too Big to Succeed?” – Woody’s comments in the video re: the stifling effects of bureaucracy in IT inspired me to discuss the need for embedded IT to address those effects and to promote better customer-centricity than what’s normal for project-oriented IT shops.
- “Serendipity and successful innovation” – Greger’s post pointed out that structure is insufficient to promote innovation, organizations must be prepared to recognize and respond to opportunities and that innovation must be able to scale.
- “Inflection Points and the Ingredients of Innovation” – I expanded on Greger’s post, using WWI as an example of a time where innovation yielded uneven results because effective innovation requires technology, understanding of how to employ it, and an organizational structure that allows it to be used well.
- “Social innovation and tech go hand-in-hand” – Greger continued with the same theme, the social and technological aspects of innovation.
- “Organizations and Innovation – Swim or Die!” – I discussed the ongoing need of organizations to adapt to their changing contexts or risk “death”.
- “Innovation – Resistance is Futile” – Continuing on in the same vein, Greger points out that resistance to change is futile (though probably inevitable). He quotes a professor of his that asserted that you can’t change people or groups, thus you have to change the organization.
- “Changing Organizations Without Changing People” – I followed up on Greger’s post, agreeing that enterprise architectures must work “with the grain” of human nature and that culture is “walking the walk”, not just “talking the talk”.
- “Developing the ‘innovation habit’” – Greger talks about creating an intentional, collaborative innovation program.
- “Innovation on Tap” – I responded to Greger’s post by discussing the need for collaboration across an organization as a structural enabler of innovation. Without open lines of communication, decisions can be made without a feel for customer wants and needs.
- “Worthless ideas and valuable innovation” – Greger makes the point that ideas, by themselves, have little or no worth. It’s one thing to have an idea, quite another to be able to turn it into a valuable innovation.
- “Accidental Innovation?” – I point out that people are key to innovation. “Without the people who provide the intuition, experience and judgement, we are lacking a critical component in the system.”
- “Technology permeats innovation” – Greger talks about how tightly coupled innovation and technology are and the need for IT to actively add value to the process.
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