A few days ago I overheard someone talking about outsourcing. At one point, they said “it’s hard to outsource innovation.” I couldn’t help snickering at this - it’s probably just as hard to insource innovation. In fact, it may be harder.
Corporate IT is, by its very nature, a barrier to innovation. This is true at many levels, starting with your management chain. How many layers of buy-in are required to try something new? What if you actually have to buy something to try it? Hierarchical organizations make innovation harder because they impose a decision-making layer of bureaucracy upon the innovators.
Most large organizations are hierarchical, with varying degrees of bureaucracy, but Corporate IT takes it several steps further than just the natural problems of a large organization. We’ve created special processes designed to resist innovation and change. I’m talking about the project management “best practices” (yes, I mean this sarcastically) of change management, upfront requirements, and “contracts” between business and IT.
How many times have you heard an IT manager try to tell the business something like the following: “Don’t tell us how to do it. Just tell us what you want done and we’ll figure out how to do it”? This is a typical response to our business partners doing their best to explain a problem and a potential solution.
Sure, sometimes the business tells us to solve problems in crazy ways that might ultimately be harmful to the organization. I’ve seen that first hand on multiple occasions. But I think there is a better way to avoid the negative outcome of crappy software than telling the business to stay out of IT.
One of the things that often happens when IT managers send this message to business partners is a counter-productive power struggle. Managers on both sides start this escalation process through their reporting chain until they either merge or one of them has to back down because of the eminence to the other. Guess who almost always has to back down? IT.
I think this problem would go away if IT managers would stop seeing business “design” as a bad thing. I prefer to think of it as an attempt of our business partners to move away from the legalistic relationship that plagues IT and collaborate with us. It doesn’t necessarily mean we design it the way they suggest, but it does mean we let them play. Anyone who can contribute should be allowed to. Designs express intent, and often that intent is more important than the requirements the business might write down and throw over the wall. By letting them play in design activities with us, we understand their intent better and are more likely to create a solution that solves the problem we are focused on. In the process, we help the business to have confidence in our skills as technology problem solvers.
When the business is confident in you, innovation becomes easier. They will take risks on you - spend money on the possibility of a big win, and together you will fail or succeed. When the business believes in you, your management will tend to get out of the way, whether they believe in you or not. Everyone in IT knows where the bread is buttered, and it’s not on the IT reporting chain.
Collaboration is the key to innovation. The best collaboration happens when you set aside the restrictions organizations create around roles and let people play. Here are some rules I’ve come up with over the years that I think encourage collaboration and innovation:
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