The CIO Playbook: Strategies and Best Practices for IT Leaders to Deliver Value

Chapter 3

Step 3: Innovate

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

—Steve Jobs

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Innovate: Build cost-effective and high-performance IT products and services that deliver value and are strategically aligned with business goals and objectives.

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Where does innovation come from? Some ideas come from your business partners, other ideas come from your customers and suppliers, and some of the best ideas come from your IT staff. Innovations come in many shapes and sizes. Some are incremental improvements that improve operational efficiencies or create a small advantage over competitors. Other innovations are more radical and create new business opportunities. In either case, you need a process to capture, evaluate, and act on the ideas. This chapter describes a comprehensive but practical method to tap into your company's rising reservoir of new, undeveloped, and untried methods to solve real business problems.

Turn Ideas into Action

To capitalize on innovation in a competitive global economy, CIOs must solve today's problems yesterday by seizing opportunities to leverage emerging technologies. Innovation expert Arthur VanGundy noted that innovation has hit the corporate world with a force unknown in previous generations of business trends; however, profit-driven organizations have not been alone. Globalization of technology, media, cultures, commerce, and the new economy has created a momentum to forge new directions ...