IT staff are well positioned to kick-start and drive
innovation across an organisation, according to Royal Mail chief
information officer David Burden, who believes there are two
elements to consider when organising for innovation in a business:
corporate culture and the role of IT.
Instilling the will to innovate is a key factor in marrying the
strengths of a large company with the kind of innovation found in
smaller organisations, he said.
"We must reward success, but we must reward failure too. That is
hard for all organisations," he said. Burden's previous company,
Qantas, for example, had a quarterly award for the most creative
effort that did not succeed.
"We need to give people the space, time, financial support and
freedom to act," he said.
Technology has an important role in business innovation, said
Burden. "Technology often enables innovation. IT people are
connected across the business so they have the contacts and they
know the real problems," he said.
"IT people are also prepared to take career risks and modest
funds can usually be found within an IT department as no one really
understands IT budgets. Most long-lasting value is created in skunk
works [projects out of view of mainstream management].
"IT people are also used to dealing with innovative suppliers.
They work in an area of fast growing innovation that percolates
into in-house IT."
Burden said IT people are therefore well placed to lead
innovation in the business, being a source of ideas, a catalyst,
and in a position to engage and get those ideas through quickly to
the business.
Royal Mail's Innovation Laboratory is a case in point. It is a
staffed with facilitators to stimulate and encourage ideas in a
structured but free flowing environment. It was set up by the IT
research group and in 2002 transferred to the human resources
department. A key point, however, is that the HR department could
not have set up the facility without IT's expertise.
Another example quoted by Burden, to illustrate where an IT
department's innovation was transferred elsewhere for successful
routine operation, was from Qantas where the internet site was
built in a skunk works but then moved to the commercial side of the
business.
But Burden warned of the danger in thinking that internal
innovation can be translated into sales revenue. "Some
organisations have delusions of commercial grandeur," he said.
"Often large companies have the idea of developing some technology,
patenting it and launching in to a new world as an IT service or
software application provider. There is very little evidence that
this works for large companies - it is not what we do."
The challenge, he said, is recruiting and keeping people with
innovative drive and helping them pick something up and drive it
against the odds.
Quoting Canadian ice-hockey hero Wayne Gretzky, Burden said,
"Those are the people who go where the puck is going to be, not
where it is."