Consumer Driven IT

Is IT Prepared to Innovate?

In June we hosted a 25-city seminar event titled “The Innovation Imperative: Closing the IT Gap to Meet Demand and Accelerate Success,” which was attended by more than 300 IT managers and executives. The event included interactive polling of participants across the 25 cities, and I recently had a chance to review some of the poll results and consider what they say about the current state of IT innovation.

IT knows it must innovate but confidence is sometimes lacking

Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they are being very proactive and aggressively driving innovation into all aspects of their business and another 37% are making investments similar to their competitors. Only 21% were solely or primarily focused on maintaining systems and “keeping the lights on.”

When asked about their ability to effectively drive innovation initiatives to meet end-user and business demand, 27% reported they are very confident and another 47% said they are somewhat confident. However, the remaining quarter are not very or at all confident they can do this, which given the importance of IT to driving innovation, is a troubling statistic.

Reducing costs continues to be a major theme

When asked about the theme of their major IT initiatives in 2012, 74% chose items related to taking costs out of the system, versus 26% who picked new investments. It’s a logical conclusion that IT’s confidence in being able to drive innovation is negatively impacted by their lack of resources and budget and the continued need to reduce costs.

Other concerns and issues are starting to trump security

Almost anytime we ask a poll question about obstacles or concerns to implementing new technology, security usually comes out as #1.This time only 27% picked security as their top concern, whereas 28% said maintaining a consistent end-user experience, and the other 45% highlighted issues such as capacity planning and optimization, addressing cloud-related issues and developing a solid ROI/business case.

Given the “perfect storm” convergence of better/cheaper/faster digital interactions, rapidly expanding new channels to revenue, and disruptive technologies such as social, mobile, cloud and big data, IT has the opportunity to lead their organization’s innovation initiatives. The only remaining question is can they figure out how to do this while maintaining their current infrastructure *and* reducing costs at the same time?