Advanced Information Management

The secret sauce of highest-value innovation?

By Thornton May

During his keynote address at the recent BetterManagement LIVE conference in Las Vegas, best-selling author and market researcher Geoffrey Moore told the audience of alpha-information managers that innovation has to be one of the most talked about, least understood and poorly acted upon words in the business vocabulary today. Innovation has resurfaced on the corporate radar screen in a big, big way.
  
Defining innovation cycles: an exercise you SHOULD do at home
During the past three years, researchers at the IT Leadership Academy (ITLA) asked thousands of executives to divide the years 1987 through 2017 into "information management eras." Workshop participants were typically given 15 minutes to complete the exercise.

The vast majority of respondents approached the exercise from a "which technology did we use" standpoint, resulting in variations on the theme of mainframe, mini, PC, client/server, Internet and wireless. However, most respondents focused on the past and ran out of time before they could focus on the years 2006 through 2017. This tells us several things:

1. People tend to obsess about what the technology is versus what the technology does – a classic features-and-functions over benefits-delivered mental blind spot. Highest-value innovators don’t focus on the technology per se; they see the technology change and focus on the opportunities created by that technology change. This kind of foresight and what-if analysis requires advanced information management.
2. People tend to work the problem “forward” by starting in 1987 and working linearly from there, versus starting in 2017 and working the problem backward. Highest-value innovators practice a form of information management labeled by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as long-headedness – the ability to focus on a distant horizon.
3. Most participants spend the majority of their thinking-time in the past or present, with little creative time left to think about the future.

Seasons of innovation
We asked independent analysts, ITLA researchers and colleagues at the Ohio State University to do a series of follow-up interviews with workshop participants, paying particular attention to the purposes and drivers of IT behavior. Their research surfaced the following Information Management Seasons:

• 1985 - 1995: A season of efficiency and cost-cutting.
• 1995 - 2000: A season of innovation and chaos.
• 2000 - 2005: A season of efficiency and cost-cutting.
• 2006 - Today and beyond: A season of simultaneous equations – innovation, growth AND efficiency. 

This is exciting. We're just now entering a period in which innovation and growth are the stated objectives of IT. In 2005, Booz Allen Hamilton conducted a study of the 1,000 biggest spenders in innovation, including the companies with the largest research and development budgets around the world. According to the study, investment in R&D alone does not automatically generate profits, revenues, growth or shareholder returns.* Instead, the study concluded, "The simple decision to invest in innovation is not enough." 

So what should you invest in? I believe the secret sauce of highest-value innovation is advanced information management: knowing where to look, knowing what questions to ask and knowing what the answers mean.

Let's explore this hypothesis in future issues of sascom. I'll be contributing a regular column that focuses on information management and innovation.

*Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff and Rakesh Bordia, "Money Isn't Everything," strategy+business (Winter 2005).

Bio: Thornton May,  Executive Director and Dean at the IT Leadership Academy, is one of the premier visionaries in the IT industry.