October 3, 2007

Driving Innovation and Enterprise Architecture

The Wall Street Journal, 24 September 2007 reports that “managing innovation is one of the biggest challenges that companies face.” Why? “They not only need to come up with new ideas, but also need to foster a culture that encourages and rewards innovation.”

Douglas Solomon, the Chief Technology Officer of IDEO (an innovation and design consulting firm) provides some insights on how to make a culture more innovative:

In general, “corporations inherently have antibodies that come out and try and kill any innovation.” Small companies don’t have sufficient resources and big companies “don’t always have the thought processes and the skills to really think outside their current business, nor the permission to really do it.”

Here are four things organizations need to be innovative:

  1. Degree of discomfort—“there are still people who say, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And I don’t think these companies are in a really good position to change…you have to have a certain degree of discomfort in your business to be willing to make the changes that are necessary
  2. Design thinking—rather than analytical thinking extrapolating from the past to the future, innovative thinking requires ‘design thinking’, which is rooted in creativity, optimism and is goal-driven, trying to create new possibilities for a new future.
  3. Time to innovate—“you have to actually build processes, you have to support people, you have to give them time…to think on their own…you have to provide a reward system for encouraging innovation.”
  4. Risk tolerance—“you have to tolerate risk, if you’re going to try to be innovative.” Doug Merrill the VP of engineering and CIO of Google adds that “Every company in the world says ‘don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness.’ Every company in the world says ‘It’s OK to fail.” And for 99% of them, it’s probably not true.”

In User-centric EA, developing a target state and transition plan for an organization requires innovation. If there is no innovation in your target architecture and plans, then you’re just regurgitating the same old stuff to the enterprise and it’s probably of very limited, if any, value. EA must step outside its traditional box and come to the table with innovative ideas and new approaches to the business; that is it’s real value add.

As we see above, being innovative is hard: It requires sometimes going against the grain, standing out amidst nay-sayers and the ‘old guard,’ looking outside the enterprise for best practices and marketplace trends, and being optimistic and open-minded to future possibilities that are not eclipsed by ingrained thinking and turf battles. Finally architecting the future state must be grounded in present realities (including constraints such as resources, politics, and other priorities and requirements), but innovate we must if we are to make a better state tomorrow than the one we have today!


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