54% of CEOs Dissatisfied With Innovation 210
athloi writes "Invention is new and clever; innovation is a process that takes knowledge and uses it to get a payback. Invention without a financial return is just an expense. Ideas are really the sexy part of innovation and there's rarely a shortage of them. If you look at the biggest problems around innovation, rarely does a lack of ideas come up as one of the top obstacles; instead, it's things like a risk-averse culture, overly lengthy development times and lack of coordination within the company. Not enough ideas, on the other hand, is an obstacle for only 17 percent. At the end of the day all that creativity and all those ideas have to show on the bottom line. The goal of innovation is to make or save money, and IT should never lose sight of that central fact."
Re:97% of Innovators Dissastisfied with CEOs (Score:3, Interesting)
The same CEOs that get copyrights exended? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps they should get a fucking clue?
Re:97% of Innovators Dissastisfied with CEOs (Score:3, Interesting)
We still get to do cool stuff and every once in a while, we have something that gets monetized. But for the most part, we work on cool stuff and the demos keep the management happy.
Re:It's no surprise to me (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it will be taken and weighed against the vendors. How one presents an idea to management will likely be what is not taken seriously.
Sun, IBM, etc all have solutions and they work. They are packaged, supported, planned, installed, warranted, and documented. How do you present your stellar ideas to management? In a dusty old computer that reeks of "homebuilt", a cheesy black and white Powerpoint presentation, no plan for failure, no support structure, no redundancy, no analysis (as in a real B-school style analysis) of cost structure and other lost opportunity to compare your idea to a professional idea?
This is what I see when a brilliant idea comes out of IT. Half baked, kool-aid drinking engineers reapplying another bug ridden Linux tool convinced that their idea is the best simply because they conjured it themselves and on the face it seems cheaper.
Spend a few minutes and package your idea. Bell Labs developed ideas well because they thought them through obsessively and not because they were presented and accepted at the half-baked stage of development.
I'm not saying that half baked ideas are bad. Not at all. It's simply that a half baked idea cannot be evaluated well against a fully supported (vendor) idea. In a fear-driven shareholder environment, a well thought out plan of a good idea trumps a crappy brilliant idea every time.
There IS a real problem here... (Score:2, Interesting)
What this is telling us is that we have good ideas, but we're not realizing gains from them.
Well, some obvious culprits:
* Poor identification of what ideas will be the ones to generate returns. In a number of large company, the CIO is personally making these decisions, based on proposals that bubble up through several layers of management. That means the person with the idea isn't advocating it, and there are also a number of people in the process who's primary responsibility isn't being innovative. Ideas get trapped by not being someone's "pet project" or having a poor advocate.
* Poor processes. Quite a lot of organizations have significant bureaucratic oversight of project process. This can limit the pace at which innovation is delivered (witness the revolution in Agile development). The main conculusion is that the CIO will get more, better, faster by NOT making the process as burdensome, and even trading off some of his "certainty" about the results.
* Poor projections for truly innovative products. A lot of "management" managers, who don't really understand technology, make decisions based on cost vs/ expected returns. This means you're insisting on seeing an expected return and an expected cost up front, before the project even starts. These are estimates, meaning they're largely guesses. And while this is necessary to some degree, putting too much emphasis on "the bottom line" at this point can be counterproductive. Notably, it weights towards "similar to known"/"safe" projects, rather than game breaking opportunities where "well, we don't really know what the return will be" projects.
* Poor planning. Many large organizations budget on a yearly cycle, and will lay out the budgets based on the current backlog of products. This can be very difficult to change. Which means the average idea sits 6 months before the next budget cycle before it even possibly gets into next year's plan, and even then it's not clear when it will be delivered. There's no leftover budget for someone to recognize "this is a HUGE idea and we need to act now to capture this opportunity." Too many people treat the software industry like the construction industry, where you can "plan and forget" for the year. A lot of companies compound this by making managers and exec's objectives tied to specific projects--now you have people incentivized to deliver on "the plan" and ignore new ideas, even if they think the new idea is more important/better than the planned project.