CIOs’ Instrumental Role in Encouraging Innovation

CIOs — and the IT organization as a whole — play an instrumental role in creating a culture of innovation. CIOs weigh in on what this looks like in practice.

Innovation doesn’t just happen. As Rita McGrath argues in “Seeing Around Corners,” innovation requires a corporate commitment at all levels to create a portfolio of wins, as well as cadres of highly skilled practitioners.

Given this, how do we develop adaptive corporations that successfully manage for today as well as for the future? How can organizations set in place the people, processes and technology needed to succeed today, and at the very same time build for future business requirements? This is a great question for CIOs who are living with change day in and day out.

Innovation starts with education. Those leading the change need to know where to go with their new ideas. They also need to perceive where there is a reward for taking what can be personal risk in pursuing an idea. And in cases where CIOs are themselves pushing the organization forward — being what Deloitte calls change instigators — they need to partner with the influencers within their company to get innovation happening. This means CIOs need to consciously build the right relationships and open processes for working with business counterparts.

At the same time, CIOs need to make it clear that it is acceptable to learn and fail. Without this understanding, it’s hard to tell people not to worry about failure. A culture that look to place blame when something goes wrong will not succeed at innovation.

According to CIO Paige Francis, organizations fail at innovation where “historically mistakes were penalized or there is immature staff and culture. All surmountable with focus, buy-in and lots of energy. You have to build the right environment to succeed.” With the right culture, energy on the technical side, organizations can move “to quelling the effect of tech debt and paved cow paths, which pulls time, energy and headspace away from innovation,” said former CIO Joanna Young. The final ingredient is adding experimentation to the innovation process. Former CIO Isaac Sacolick said, “innovation is more than business change, it’s transformational, especially at the executive level. Experimenting, incremental planning, feedback-driven pivots, proofs of concepts, pilots for many are a relatively new, but they are key to innovation and digital transformation.” For these to work, leadership needs to show it accepts not only experimentation but a continuous fail, learn, innovate cycle.

Part of all this is CIOs accepting the mandate for IT leaders to become business people, to learn to speak the language of business, to understand current business processes and the limitations current operations are creating.

For CIO Deb Gildersleeve, “having the internal influencers in place is a great basis for a center of excellence model that can be augmented throughout the rest of the organization.” Successful CIOs understand that having IT aligned with business people, and getting to know them as people, matters. CIOs should set the standard here by working with line of business leaders to establish a culture of innovation that permeates the entire organization. Former CIO Tim McBreen said, “he used influencer partnerships to instill innovation in the organization and establish business innovators. They got all the credit with IT supporting them. We never said IT did it. We said business did it and influencers got the credit in all leadership meetings.”

For this reason, it is critical that CIOs facilitate an innovation platform where ideas can be shared to solve company problems and people can comment, discuss and vote for the best ideas.