A Path to Business Innovation

Innovation may be the most over-used word in technology. That said, the truth is that businesses need to innovate to survive, and IT has to either keep up or – better yet – lead the charge. I’m not talking about innovation for innovation’s sake. Constant, unfocused experimentation with new technology in search of the next new thing doesn’t help IT or the business. As IT leaders, we must be close enough to the business to understand whether to seek out existing technology or invent a new solution to address a business need. Our most important job is to make sure we innovate with the business to achieve shared goals.

Driving solutions directly from IT without full alignment belies a level of ownership and commitment with the business. There must be a joint partnership in order to establish and maintain trust. Too often there are many layers between the technology solutions and the required business solutions. True alignment and partnership require an IT organization that is aligned and intimate with the business and not organized around layers of technology siloes.

At VMware, we have aligned our organization around key business processes and functions – in fact we don't even mention IT in our functional org chart. We span across eight different processes and eighteen business functions with business relationship managers who cover each area. They carry the cost of services, scorecard of delivery, and application and process roadmaps. We focus on the business and where it needs to go, not on the technology. Technology becomes an implementation detail that we get to once you understand the business need and desired direction. Technology goes from being the solution to being an enabler.

Innovation requires strategic thinking, and investments in your people. If your IT organization functions as a cost center and is just keeping the lights on, you may not have the budget relief to invest in innovation or transformation. It’s a typical conundrum in IT: running really fast to keep up, but never getting ahead. The familiar refrain of “I’d like to be more strategic but my left arm’s on fire” keeps us mired in the current and not forward-enabling. We need to reward doing fewer things, but doing them better. Here at VMware we've purposely freed up people from the woes of operational day jobs to give them a chance to focus on architecture, strategy, and innovation. Creating a tech kitchen or an alpha-lab for people to express technical creativity can lead you to the types of innovative, strategic solutions that the business requires. If you get this right and you enable the business to grow, scale and add competitive advantage it is easier to justify budget increases or to reclaim savings for more innovation and forward looking investments.

Finally, it’s important to remember that people in technology love technology; however, when it comes to the business, they don't always have that same natural passion. Don't start with technology -- you'll inevitably get there. All too often, opportunities for automation and digitization across business processes get overlooked because human middleware executes them. If the business doesn’t get behind automation, focusing on technology innovations becomes moot. Eighty percent of most processes are time-waste, with only 20 percent spent on actual execution. Even if you eliminated all the waste, the 20 percent that's left is still slow when it's manually executed. You have to think about how you digitize or automate the entire process, which then leads to game changing results. Taking a process from months to weeks is not game-changing, but taking it from months to minutes is.

@PaulChapmanVM