There was a time, not so long ago, when the marketing of information technology was built on the myth that buying the latest software and hardware was a good way for a company to gain a competitive advantage. Install our gizmo and leave the competition in the dust! That pitch hasn’t gone away entirely, but it’s lost its punch. Nobody quite believes it anymore. In its place, though, has come a new and much fuzzier claim: IT is an “enabler” or a “catalyst” for corporate innovation. Install our latest gizmo and watch your people get all creative!
Writing in today’s Globe and Mail, Dan McLean says that the “IT as innovation enabler” claim fails the smell test: “Rumours of IT’s value as a catalyst for innovation have been greatly exaggerated.” He debunks a new SAP survey which, the software company claims, shows that Canadian CIOs believe “IT has a crucial role to play in enabling innovation.” When you read the fine print of the survey, you find that only 6% of the IT leaders ranked innovation as the biggest benefit of IT, well behind operational efficiency (36%) and productivity (26%) and even behind “mobilizing workforces” (8%). Here’s the headline SAP put on the press release promoting the survey: “Canada’s Road to Business Growth and Innovation Runs Through the IT Department.” Here’s how an honest headline would have read: “”Canada’s Road to Cost Cutting Runs Through the IT Department.”
It’s not “that IT doesn’t have any part to play in helping businesses to be innovative,” writes McLean; “rather it’s the disconcerting trend by purveyors of IT to perhaps oversell the value of innovation achieved through IT investment … The truth may be that achieving business innovation has much more to do with smart people than smart technology.” He ends by quoting Mark Twain: “Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid.”
Nick,
I’ve been in IT for 17+ years and I agree with your conclusions. I posted a related piece yesterday about “IT not meeting expectations” based upon an article by Paul Murphy at ZDNet.
Upper management must become more comfortable and knowledgable with technology so that they can provide direction, vision, and clear goals as well as limits for IT. Until then, IT will best serve IT.
Mclean is far too generous to IT. Ask any senior manager what the major obstacles to corporate change are and IT is always mentioned as one of the key culprits. Far from acting as a catalyst, many IT systems act as organizational formaldehyde, pickling and preserving structures and procedures long past their useful life.
In my experience, most senior executives would trade a pound of IT innovation for a few ounces of good solid IT execution.
An interesting whitepaper from LSE talks about this = “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way you do it” at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/nojournal/sadun_bvr25.pdf
John
(and furthermore, I bet if the truth were to be told, the headline would really read: “Canada’s Road to Cost Cutting Runs Through the IT Department, but only after four years of pain, delays, IT project budget overruns and at least two sacrificial CIOs at which point it may not matter anyway.”
I’d say this title is 100% wrong .. and I am on the business side.
Obviously the implication is the interaction between business clients and technology people.
The real reality is a mind shifting (because it never happened before in large Co’s) teamwork between developers and business designers. The key here is NO business requirement document, and no project managers. Its about conversation.
Business owners who know enough to be dangerous, working closely with serious geek developers … this is the key to success, because it eliminates costly intermediaries, and more importantly ensures rapid and effective development.
Both Earl and Greg comments point to same issue. Senior management still does not get IT. IT is computers, and the CIO is the Uber computer guy/gal.
For corporate IT, the current theme is cost savings. It’s all commodities and utilities. For SME is still about innovation. This is where I think Colin hits the nail on the head: “Business owners who know enough to be dangerous, working closely with serious geek developers”.
I have to sadly agree with Greg Quinn: all too often, IT acts as an inhibitor to innovations which business people are trying to accomplish.
This does not mean, though, that IT is not important to strategy and innovation. Consider manufacturing as an analogy. The Toyota Production System was not technology-based; it focused on the improvement of workflow and of job definitions and responsibilities supporting that workflow. However, it didn’t make machine tools obsolete–no one would have claimed that machine tools “didn’t matter” anymore. Indeed, there surely were needs for new production technologies (faster die change for presses, for example) brought about by the TPS.
Nickーsan,
It is pleasure for me to read your blogs.
As for the alignment of the business and IT,
I think that it would be necessary to consider the
business strategy at first.
Because the cache of the business activity would be
genelated out by the business model.
Next, we would consider the means(or tools) to realize
such a business approach.
Now it would be necessary for the executive
to have the skill in the both sides of the business and
IT.
The business innovation is important for the enterprises,
and also the role of IT as the tool of the realization.
Kaizen in Toyota Motor would be wider meaning
in addition to the improvement of the business process is
merely contained.
Now young managers would begin to consider the better
ways
of the alighment in IT and the business, I mean.
SAP is the antithesis of innovation. Debunking the claims of this long time IT marketing shill isn’t that impressive is it?
Let’s try some better examples:
How about Wikipedia? About 2,000 academics in a community struggling to get something called Nupedia off the ground. Enter Ward Cunningham’s Wiki technology and in a blink, Wikipedia is a top 12 ranked Internet destination according to Alexa.
Or let’s take Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type (and many like it). Blogging technology enables Nick for pennies per day to host this fine publication and be read by many more people than ever saw him in HBR. To boot, he uses another technology innovation, Google Adsense to make a killing in advertising.
Overstating the impact of technology on innovation? I guess it just depends on where you choose to look…
To boot, he uses another technology innovation, Google Adsense to make a killing in advertising.
$3.50 a day, baby!