Thursday, June 16, 2011

CIOs getting the message: Innovation is about the business

By James M. Connolly

Innovation in information technology is not about making systems run faster; It’s about understanding the business and matching technology to opportunities to move that business ahead, attendees heard from speakers at the New England CIO Innovation Summit, presented by Mass High Tech and Boston SIM, today.

“How do you make it to the board of the company? It’s easy to say but very difficult to do. The key is to learn everything you can about the business beyond the technology,” said keynoter Tsvi Gal, a partner with Exigen Capital and former chief technology officer of Deutsche Bank Asset Management and Investment Banking. Gal, who also is president of New York SIM, emphasized that companies and CIOs cannot mandate innovation, saying, “Innovation isn’t something you create. It’s a culture.” He told the 150 attendees at Babson College Executive Conference Center how Deutsche Bank drove innovation by establishing an environment where an employee who took a chance on a new project didn’t have to worry about losing their job if the project didn’t work out, where a social network worked through new ideas, and where innovators had the opportunity to get up to 10 percent of the profits of a new venture that they helped to launch.

Speaking on a panel focused on how CIOs move from the server room to the board room, former Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. CIO Dave Kuttler said Vertex has encouraged innovation by adopting Google Inc.’s model for giving employees time to work on fresh ideas. He said his IT team was told to dedicate 10 percent of their time to “something outside of operations.” He said the company monitored the time allocation and “dinged” managers who didn’t allow workers to spend time away from their core responsibilities. “We began to see a happier group of employees. Then we also got good feedback from our customers outside of IT,” said Kuttler.

When Jay Leader, CIO of iRobot Corp., was asked about something innovative that he has done, Leader noted that it was spending months trying to recruit, and eventually hiring, a brilliant guy, who provided the company with an additional benefit – a cadre of excellent people. “Bright people attract other bright people. A players attract other A players.”

Meanwhile, Babson CIO Sam Dunn emphasized that one approach to innovation doesn’t work for everyone. Working in an environment where students and faculty generate “tons of ideas,” he established a four-stage system to identify the best ideas, refine them and then execute on them.

A panel of CIOs also looked at the challenges companies face in leveraging mobile computing. Former deputy CIO of Partners HealthCare and now a professor of management at Simmons College, Mary Finlay described how tablet computers have helped Partners’ nurses not only save the time wasted by walking back from a patient’s room to the nurses station, but improved the quality of care by ensuring that patients got the right medicines, and that information they entered enabled doctors to get an up-to-date view of patient statuses.

She also encouraged CIOs to embrace mobile computing, in part because of the changing workforce, with a new generation of employees expecting to have mobile access to technology. If IT resists the mobile trend, users not only won’t trust IT, they will create their own “shadow IT” operations.

Bob Egan, managing director of the Sepharim Group, described the expectations surrounding mobile IT as “consumerization of IT,” where employees expect to have the same types of applications at work that they have in their private lives.

“People come in and say, ‘Where’s my instant messaging?’ They’re on the bleeding edge when it comes to functionality. It’s what they have at home and they expect it at work,” added Steven Fusco, CIO of Clean Harbors  Inc. Fusco said that CIOs have to recognize that smart phones or Apple Inc. iPads are really “still a PC, still something that talks to the network.”

City of Boston CIO Bill Oates described how a mobile strategy — in particular, a phone app that allows citizens to report problems such as potholes and dead streetlights — has involved citizens in government, and has spawned greater use of mobile devices by the supervisors and staffs that deliver services.

In a discussion of cloud computing, speakers emphasized that the first thing a CIO has to understand is that there is no single definition of cloud computing, and that every enterprise is likely to have a different mix of the various types of cloud and hosted computing. CIOs also are taking different paths to a cloud strategy.

Kip Turco, senior vice president with WindStream Hosted Solutions described how some customers are starting off with private clouds and then moving to public clouds once they discover that they need additional resources that are readily available in the public cloud. Meanwhile, John Considine, CTO of CloudSwitch, told of enterprises that got into public cloud services first with lower-risk applications, and then moved into private clouds with their mission-critical applications.

Jeff Kaplan, director of ThinkStrategies, noted that large enterprises are leading the way in cloud strategies by moving production-level, mission critical applications to the cloud. A driving factor, he said, was their ability to launch new applications faster without the hassle of negotiating licensing prices and provisioning.

Mass High Tech and Boston SIM recognized the seven finalists and winners in the New England CIO Innovation Awards program.

The winners were Rich Adduci, Boston Scientific Corp., in the Enterprise category; Martin King of Gurnet Consulting in the Mid-Sized Company category, and Bill Oates of the City of Boston in the Public Sector/Education category.