The INNOVATION Technology for Professionals

Talking about the future the IT will have to cross an important barrier. When talking about the IT (Information Technology), we usually put the accent more on T (technology) than I (information). Perhaps we should think about I as coming from INNOVATION, a business one. Why do we never talk about The Business Innovation Technology?

One cause could be the lack of professionalism in organizing methods and emphasis on business perspective. Organizing on technologies and not on processes can create great fissures very hard to be overtaken/passed.
Information is the one which creates the added value and is capable to ensure the aspect that makes the difference and makes room for the competitive advantage. Information is processed, injected in the organization body for interpretation purposes, for sustaining the decision support, for making you different and placing you one-step ahead the competition. Information is the one that needs to be handy for the non IT specialists. However, information itself does not help. You can have the information but you may not know how to use it, may be it is not helping you in the organization structures, internal processes and/or maybe the organization is not business innovation oriented.

A agile, quick organization is always an integrated organization. Sometimes from different reasons of internal politics, like not loosing an ephemeral role, or from lack of communication, or lack of management knowledge and organization methods, or because of sector approaches for reasons of daily race that never let you raise the head, we end up with hard interoperable silos/blocks.
Although in history the “Divide and Impera” adagio used to be somehow efficient, but even then not for very long periods of time, in a modern structure this works very hard and only on medium periods, with further negative effects/outcome.
Because shareholders are interested in final dividends the more fragmented the structures and processes are, the requirements are more seen in an arbitrary manner, the indirect costs become greater, the time to market goes down, the opportunities and money are loosing.

An integrated/complete/ideal/intelligent/quality-oriented organization should integrate the IT processes in its internal processes.
It does not matter where and how is the IT itself. IT can be an internal one, or it can be outsourced.
If the IT is organized on processes, according to standards and these processes are integrated in the company’s processes it does not matter.
You can make a business process more efficient by analyzing it deep inside, or perhaps changing it without any IT interventions or requesting automations and IT solutions to implement new processes or innovative ideas.

There are four interdependent architectural levels/tiers that rely one another:
The business architecture – that defines the products and the main streams and types of business operations
The processes architecture – that support that products and business services are carried out/unfolded in an efficient manner
The IT solutions architecture – a map of applications that support the processes and ensure the real implementation of business services and processes
The IT infrastructure architecture – where we find the technological support (servers, communications, networks, etc)

What happens in general/usually? Any business requirement is transforming in a new IT application, a server is bought here and there, creating a complicated, hard to manage thicket of applications, which TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) becomes unjustified. Why is this happening? Because the IT architectures are not integrated in the processes and in the business architectures, because there is no change management framed in a unitary and consistent strategy.
Not the least because the IT is seen only as the technological support arm and not as a partner in business innovation development.
And there is a difference between the IT innovation and the business innovation. The performance is reached when The IT generates business innovation and not the technology itself.

To achieve this you need a correct defined vertical organization, integrated with the horizontal organization. Here it comes the CIO function, its role. Many times it is defined only in a formal way, but without having the required changing levers. In such a case, it better not be at all, as anyway can’t be efficient, although the concept itself, if correctly implemented has proved itself efficient at international level.

Sometimes the CIO function is not even defined and then because of short time objectives and management, the tactical approaches affect the innovation capabilities and the change.

Is most interesting when the business structures are asking him as a necessity to develop, in this case the pressure coming from the area that needs to develop and not to be held in the bridle of non innovative operational efficiency.

Everything around us is change and we have to be prepared for a continuous change. Change Management is a discipline itself. You cannot reach the performance of having well set processes; you cannot have them really efficient, unless you are not capable to manage the changes in an efficient way.
For each change initiator, for the one who requests a project this is the most important thing for him. We can create Business Cases, because the paper can accept so many things (!!!) and without an organizational change management, the final pressure is added to the request implementation flow, that directly affects the quality and the final efficiency in key moments of deciding, designing and developing the solution.
Here it is the Governance concept and the IT governance is extremely important. Missing an “empowered” CIO, the IT governance is transforming in a situation of improperly correlated performing requirements

The IT Governance represents that scale of balance for the Corporative Governance that can ensure the real equilibrium.

The above presented aspects briefly show how the good old IT that many used to know, no longer exists.
The New IT should be a professional structure, organized and professionally managed, that should integrate the governance principles, the change management and process management principles as a creative interface with the business, that should integrate the architectural levels of the organization within a unit and integrated strategy