A number of change management tools and models are not only useful when transforming a business or landing a project, but also in understanding why some businesses don’t operate effectively.
Two very important aspects of improving business in general and business transformation involve focusing on awareness and desire: to improve employee awareness of ways to work better, and increase desire to adopt new methods and technologies.
This post is based on the experiences and observations of Robbi Laurenson, a Microsoft Enterprise Architect and certified Prosci® consultant, who has found value in using change management principles in diagnosing organizational issues.
I recently began consulting with a company that has been struggling to effectively carry out strategic plans. It’s been easy to see at an intuitive level that there’s dysfunction in the business, but it’s been hard identifying or describing it explicitly and understanding how to approach solving it.
The problems have been especially evident as we’ve pursued changes in business operations and infrastructure. Attempting to carry out and manage necessary changes has revealed that there are deeper problems stemming from the organization itself that need to be addressed.
Morale has been low in this business, politics is evident around every corner, and there’s a lack of direction in current and planned activities.
One of the executives has turned out to be very negative about business changes. Other executives haven’t had the mandate to make decisions, and the business often seems paralyzed rather than able to effectively move forward.
Even just one problematic executive affected the larger organization. The leader was not engaged in the right ways, and was unaware of the impact this silent message was having on the rest of the organization. This was not driving the business in the right direction.
Though my influence as an Enterprise Architect is sometimes limited to driving specific initiative activities, I found this engagement largely about helping make the right things happen, in the midst of executive turmoil. I had to rely on a set of soft skills to help unblock the political situation.
I had an intuitive understanding of the organizational issues in this engagement, but I wanted a more structured approach that would help generate solutions. For example, after diagnosing business issues, we could address them during account planning, identifying key players if things go wrong, methodology for addressing organizational issues, and describing how tools and relationships can be used to communicate compelling value statements to the organization.
During this engagement, I attended Prosci® Change Management Training (see http://www.prosci.com/training/trainingoverview/).
I soon found myself mapping change management principles to diagnosing the organizational dysfunction at our client, as well as ideas for overcoming it.
The Prosci® ADKAR® model (see http://www.prosci.com/adkar-model/) describes a process that individuals go through in terms of change:
Specifically of interest to me were the phases of awareness and desire. I realized that communication issues relating to awareness were interfering with carrying out changes in my engagement, and that desire for change was ambivalent at high levels within the business.
Most people affected by change suffer from lack of awareness, which impacts all the other stages of change management. It often requires many contacts, using multiple types of media, to communicate to stakeholders. There are also different levels of awareness that people acquire about upcoming changes. Employees may be technically aware of a change without realizing that the change applies to their work.
Without adequate awareness, change does not happen smoothly, and sometimes does not happen at all. For example, one business that sublet some of their facilities forgot to inform the help desk about the new people using the equipment. When the change in facilities usage began, the help desk began getting calls from people they didn’t support, and conflict arose.
People also dislike having changes forced on them, without an explanation of the value of the change. This can make stakeholders feel that they are just cogs in a machine, without the need to know or understand. Stakeholders should understand why a change is better for them, as well as for the business. They should view opportunities enabled by the change, such as being more effective, and directly impacting the bottom line of the business.
Desire is a difficult stage of change to get through. How do you create desire in the face of resistance to change?
Keeping people informed helps overcome initial reactions against change. More desire is gained by clearly showing solutions that people will find useful.
But in most engagements, we should be building buy-in with ongoing participation of stakeholders and those who will be affected by the changes. Influencing desire begins early in the planning process. Invest in stakeholder engagement early. During this phase, it can be very useful to make a vocal champion out of someone who was antagonistic at the beginning, but who has since become a supporter of the changes.
Desire is not a set quality, especially as opinions change as changes are rolled out in phases. A great new system, with exciting and valuable benefits to the business may eventually cause someone to say, “Wait, they’re going to lay people off.” In this case, repair work needs to be done to raise the desire for the planned change and lower the risk of having adoption problems.
Desire is a fickle thing, and extremely dependent on keeping stakeholders informed of changes, value, and rationale. Changes must be seen as being well thought-out, and have involved the participation of stakeholders. Also, when business stakeholders communicate well with technical stakeholders during planning stages, IT has much more desire to enable business changes.
Both awareness and desire hinge on how you run communications through the change management process, especially in the disrupted world of a rapidly changing environment.
Two of the most important people to the success of change management are the CEO of the business, and the immediate line manager where changes are occurring. There is often no substitute for these participants: other managers don’t generally have the same influence or effectiveness in driving conversations and setting direction about change.
When you enter an account, it’s important to know if someone in a leadership position is bucking something happening, without desire for change, or thinking things won’t work out. You need to understand this individual’s drivers and personal context in order to optimize your influence. You’ll need to get this person on board: If a leader doesn’t “feel it,” the leader can’t communicate the right message to others.
When trying to influence people to “come to the party,” different approaches are needed: sometimes you can approach executives directly, and sometimes you need to approach with subtlety.
Some of the techniques for influencing business leaders include:
As I was taking the Prosci® Change Management practitioner training, it immediately became evident to me that the principles were far reaching because they deal with the core of how we get things done – people changing. Much like TOGAF® did for the harder skills in Enterprise Architecture, Prosci® tools provided a language and a framework to describe and influence how, and more importantly why, we can employ other soft skills to land successful engagements.
It’s not enough just to plan and implement – the heart of Value Realization is in landing the change that engages an organization together in creating something better. That means winning the hearts and minds of everyone involved, from start to finish.
When I find that I am struggling to understand why an engagement is not turning out the way I want, turning to the human aspects of awareness and desire is often key to understanding the underlying restrictive dynamics.
I’ve realized that change management principles are both an essential tool for landing projects, and a critical lens for understanding the inner human mechanics of the organization. In this era where we are driving not only purchase and deployment of solutions, but also adoption and utilization, change management is going to be a key pillar of our success.
How do you build relationships with business executives? Often times your opportunity to shift from a fleeting, impersonal relationship with a senior business decision maker (BDM) to a more direct relationship stems from what you can do to build rapport and curiosity in a few unplanned moments.
For Microsoft Enterprise Architect Ron Lamb, the “win” is to gain interest from the BDM for a 1:1 meeting on a topic that is of great personal curiosity or challenge. You may have an unplanned meeting in a coffee room, elevator, or after completing a larger meeting. You have a few moments to create rapport and take the first steps in building a relationship that works on a new plane, one that transcends any specific initiative that you and Microsoft are working on at that moment. What techniques and patterns seem to work to gain that initial 1:1 opportunity, and then build upon it?
This post summarizes the experiences and observations of Ron Lamb, a Microsoft Enterprise Architect involved in business strategy planning.
Over the years I’ve expanded my services from technology into business-focused development and business strategy, especially as I’ve acquired more experience across many industries and around the world.
One of my career objectives has been to quickly build great relationships with chief executives and business decision makers during our engagements. Though my participation often begins as a subject matter expert or to help drive transformation, a personal connection creates opportunities to have a larger and broader impact, and perhaps even become a special resource to that executive. David Maister’s book “The Trusted Advisor” describes the opportunity and techniques best.
For me, an important part of creating rapport and building relationships is quickly opening the door for an exchange and testing of ideas, while presenting learnings from peers.
My goal is to help business executives walk away having learned something, with skills or insights that they didn’t have earlier. I want to provide individual value, in addition to the value I bring as a part of the project team.
In my short conversation with the executive, I share my focus on a challenge that I’ve been researching and struggling with and provide some provocative element of the challenge. I seek an indication that they are challenged / perplexed by the same thing, and if so, ask if perhaps I could invite them out for an opportunity to talk to them about it. I choose a challenge that I know the executive is also curious or concerned about. I share my understanding of the size of the challenge and the opportunity, the lack of a clear industry answer, and the risk of committing to a path that has a suspect likelihood of success. Business executives have a full plate of such highly unstructured, perplexing challenges, so perhaps not unsurprisingly, I often get a positive response.
The opportunity that I imply and hope an executive responds to, is an opportunity to:
Some of the characteristics of topics that work well include:
By demonstrating your willingness to share your insights / hypotheses, you’re putting some personal capital on the table. When executives recognize this, they may reward your openness by sharing their own personal insights and hypothesis.
Very importantly, this must be a “Safe Conversation.” What you are each sharing is to the benefit of each of you as individuals, and not to become the subject of the next day’s conversations amongst the project team, or at Microsoft. This also explains the value in having this type of conversation be 1:1.
To further cement the understanding that this is not part of the ongoing work, and is between the two of us, I arrange for the meeting to be over dinner or perhaps a social setting after work. That is, I’m not using the executive’s or my “chargeable” or business time for this discussion. I avoid meeting in the executive’s office or building. Otherwise, there is an implication that this is work associated with context of the executive’s role, and existing business relationships and contracts. Meeting at the office also introduces time pressures from the need to attend upcoming meetings. The goal is to create a level of separation between the existing client / partner relationship and a burgeoning trusted relationship / advisor connection.
Avoid topics closely tied to the work you have in play at the client. Remove any sense of conflict with the Microsoft or client teams. Try to avoid the project teams questioning, “Why are we not invited to this meeting?” You have to use your own knowledge of who to inform before such a meeting. It is also your challenge to do so in a way that removes the potential of a “gate keeper's” intercession.
Discussions that I’ve personally had with executives in this setting include.
I let executives know our meeting is meant to provide an opportunity to share insights and the opportunity for me to share with them information about what some of their peers in other industries have done when facing similar challenges. When discussing lessons learned (successes and equally important for lessons learned, failures), the executive can look at ways to apply ideas to their own situation and industry.
In the prior post, “Driving Business Transformation through Business Capabilities (Trends and Insights),” we discussed using business capabilities to support strategic business transformation. Here we’ll present more information about identifying and clarifying strategic objectives, and organizing clusters of capabilities within a strategic technology portfolio that also addresses infrastructure, team, data, and processes.
This article is based on the observations and experiences of Atul Totre, a Microsoft Enterprise Architect who has helped many organizations define strategy, assess business capabilities, and improve their strategic technology portfolios.
From the perspective of a business capability model, the driving force behind investment is to transform business capabilities.
But first a business must focus on strategic objectives and understanding how value is achieved through those objectives, before choosing capabilities to transform, and then doing so in ways that produce demonstrable strategic value.
Assessing capability requirements and maturity is very difficult if strategy issues are not resolved first to provide objectives and context. Early collaboration with business leaders about strategy helps ensure an organization realizes strategic business value when transforming business capabilities.
Questions to ask regarding strategy and the current state of the business include:
Once these questions are explored, additional information is identified for planning purposes, such as:
Microsoft Enterprise Architects have been increasingly involved with COOs and defining business strategy, as well as with CIOs and the IT organization. Enterprise Architects also become involved during strategy planning when IT organizations have difficulty mapping IT investments to the balance sheet, and have difficulty identifying return on business strategy and innovation.
When Enterprise Architects are involved further upstream, they are able to provide strategy planning services in many areas, having deep knowledge, broad industry experience, and active networks of expertise to draw on.
For example, one company having difficulty meeting supply chain KPIs began investing in more warehouses, without first identifying a more effective and valuable strategic solution of adding better analysis and distribution methods. After involving an Enterprise Architect, the company was able to translate business strategy to improved operations based on analytics and identify significant KPIs and the value contributions of improving the supply chain.
Each strategic objective may involve many capabilities, clustered into services, and dependent on data, infrastructure, people, and processes. The view of how capabilities will be matured, rather than how technology is deployed, better represents the value of long term investments.
When planning a technology portfolio to fulfill strategic business objectives, a team will ask:
More specifically, important portfolio considerations:
Do we have the right items in the portfolio?
Do we understand dependencies, risks, and assumptions?
What constraints should we consider in our portfolio?
When delivery is in progress, question include:
An organization often finds it easier to tie meaningful KPI’s to a portfolio of projects, rather than to single initiatives. For example, when attempting to improve metrics for a supply chain, a business might have a portfolio of projects comprised of productivity software, analytical tools, and inventory management applications – all together producing improved KPIs related to the supply chain.
Clearly associating a portfolio of projects with the value it will produce makes it easier to obtain funding for business transformation. Rather than attempting to fund new IT components in isolation, business leaders have more success funding, for example, improvements in warehouse management capabilities. Such improvements will involve broad investment in process changes, software, infrastructure, and integration -- but the value of the investment is clearly visible and aligned with business strategy.
This post is the first in a series about using business capabilities to support strategic business transformation. Upcoming posts will discuss more details about strategic planning, and building technology portfolios to meet business objectives.
This article is based on the observations of Atul Totre, who has helped many organizations define strategy, assess business capabilities, and develop transformation roadmaps.
When businesses consider business transformation, they do so to meet strategic business goals, not necessarily technology goals. Project teams throughout a business seek quantifiable value from maturing business capabilities, without focusing on details about IT, data center modernization, identity, or other infrastructure issues.
When business problems need to be solved, an organization using a business capability model can launch a planning program to first identify and clarify strategic objectives, and then consider the business capabilities that need to be transformed, prior to designing a technical solution.
After strategy and capabilities are aligned, solution teams can implement services as collections of capabilities, specifying the infrastructure, team, data, and process elements.
This method delivers an integrated plan for business value-driven transformation, aligning business strategy with technology investments and reducing cost and waste.
A business capability represents what a company needs to be able to do to carry out its business strategy, support its mission, and maintain its position in the marketplace. For example, to manage warehouses efficiently, one company has developed capabilities for integrated planning, advanced forecasting, and flexible supply chains.
Business capabilities are not intended to model processes or define how a business does work. By focusing on capabilities rather than processes, business leaders can create the right mix and sequence of initiatives to align with strategy, not just on doing things “better, faster, cheaper.”
Business capability models vary between businesses and industries. Even in a single business, several unaligned capability models may be in use at the same time. Often, the most difficult part of developing a capability model or approach is aligning the strategies of different groups, who often use different language to describe their priorities, and differing KPIs for monitoring success and making operational adjustments.
Without performing strategic alignment, though, it remains difficult to specify or implement the services that would enable the organization to realize strategic value from investments in transformation.
Business capabilities exist in hierarchies within an organization: Strategic capabilities are made up of underlying core business capabilities, and supported with enabling business capabilities. For example, corporate strategy is aligned with sales and product development capabilities, which in turn are enabled by human resources, IT, finance, and other capabilities.
Capabilities are aligned with business functions, business services, and business processes. For example, human resources capabilities include talent acquisition business function supported by recruiting.
Multiple services typically support a business function, with each service further described by groupings of aligned capabilities. For example, talent assessment, performance management, and career planning are services that comprise the talent management business function.
When managing business capabilities, a business establishes performance goals for capabilities based on the amount they contribute to the value proposition defined in the business strategy.
From the perspective of a business capability model, the driving force behind investment is to transform business capabilities. Capabilities are intended to support strategy; investments in projects enable the new and matured capabilities.
After defining strategic objectives, a planning team begins determining information about pertinent business capabilities, functions, and services. A business asks:
Early collaboration with business leaders about strategy helps ensure an organization realizes strategic business value when transforming their capabilities. A Microsoft Architect helps a business rationalize capabilities across departments and look at how strategy can be realized by maturing groups of capabilities.
Importantly, by focusing on strategic objectives first, and understanding how value is achieved through those objectives, capabilities can be chosen and matured in ways that address specific goals and KPIs, and produce demonstrable value. Microsoft Architects often become involved during strategy planning when organizations have difficulty mapping IT investments to the balance sheet or identifying return on business strategy and innovation.
Assessing capability requirements and maturity is very difficult if strategy issues are not resolved first. A strong understanding of strategy is needed to start answering the following questions, while giving appropriate context to them:
After defining strategy objectives, an organization considers the business capabilities that will enable the strategy.
Business capability work is largely conceptual, and precedes process modeling or designing physical implementations. The approach is shown in the following steps:
Since business capabilities can span departments, functions, and services, a business can assign shared responsibility for business capabilities among appropriate business groups. Considering capabilities intact, rather than breaking them down into enabling components, makes it easier to align transformation with strategic objectives, and in turn with the associated initiatives and benefits.
Roadmaps can provide a multi-year view of technology investment needs for a capability, while supporting an integrated planning process. The language used in the roadmap is based on descriptions of key business functions, not systems. Planning discussions around these roadmaps relate to business problems, not technology.
We use several tools during a capability assessment, creating materials that become sources for the transformation roadmaps:
In the next post about using business capabilities to drive transformation, we’ll discuss more about the approach, strategy planning, and the value of defining a strategic technology portfolio to enable business capabilities.
Delivery Documentaries are a behind the scenes look at how our Enterprise Architects (EAs) in the field perform Value Realization activities for customers. The documentaries are raw and real, and the purpose is to share what actually happens on the ground. They are always a learning opportunity, and we hope that over time we can help bridge the state of the art with the state of the practice, and continue to move the ball forward.
What steps does a company take after finding out that large amounts of IP have been leaking into the hands of competitors? This example, provided by Sree Sundaram, describes how a Microsoft Architect helped a business create a strategy for protecting information.
This is a Delivery Documentary of an engagement led by the Microsoft Enterprise Strategy Program (ESP), which provides services to help customers realize the most value from their technology investments. In this engagement, an Enterprise Architect helped a client create a strategy for changing employee behavior and business processes to stop IP leakage and support robust IP protection.
Though the IP protection strategy that was developed had technical underpinnings, this engagement was primarily about
Over the years, Contoso has witnessed their IP gradually leaking into the hands of competitors, and management has recently become aware of large releases of confidential material in very short amounts of time. Problems with IP protection have affected customers, partners, employees, and governing agencies on a global scale.
The company was in the process of deploying new productivity software and a collaboration platform, and IT had addressed the technical details of protecting data at rest and in transit. However, because IP leakage had previously occurred in similarly protected environments at the company, the stakeholders began to focus more on people and processes.
Contoso needed a business strategy, not a cyber security solution. Not only was technology maturity required for IP protection, but the business wanted to know how to change people and processes at the company to ensure adoption of new technology, and awareness of and adherence to policies. A strategy, envisioned target state, and a roadmap was necessary.
I did an extensive survey of Contoso, encompassing all global employees in different divisions and different roles.
To begin, I had access to the members of a business liaison committee that had been established for an earlier project. I met with each of the senior directors that made up the committee and described the help I thought was needed, and how I could represent their interests while addressing business goals.
The directors adamantly wanted to work from a business view, not from an IT view. Supporting this, I explained the methodology and strategy I would use to improve IP protection in light of business requirements, employee behavior, and operations.
I met early, and often, with the Chief Security Officer (CSO) of Contoso. I pledged that the conclusions and advice I offered would be rationalized and based on facts, and that I would present all assessments and recommendations to him so he could discuss with his team prior to wider distribution. During the engagement, I was also able to facilitate and improve his access to the IT team regarding the status of the work. As a significant stakeholder in the engagement, it was important to be able to build trust with the CSO and his team.
While independently meeting with stakeholders, I found that many employees were worried about their work being misrepresented by others, especially in regard to responsibilities for protecting information. In my role, I was able to have separate discussions, outside of formal workshops, to effectively gather information from employees who might otherwise have been reluctant to share ideas or point out problems.
Taking a business-focused approach was critical, even though IT was a champion of improving information protection. Prior experience with IT had left many business divisions feeling that their business needs were not being addressed.
I held several workshops, with different groups of stakeholders, to determine their business perspective of information protection. How did information protection and stolen IP affect and expose them? There were many stakeholders with differing views, but after our workshops, all participants were able to more clearly articulate their requirements and better participate in the entire conversation.
The stakeholders responsible for data classification at Contoso were interested in meeting to discuss how Microsoft performed data classification. We held a workshop about our methods, the challenges we faced, outcomes, and our place in the journey.
The legal staff had originally done the data classification work for the business. After I developed a more detailed data assessment survey, the staff was able to enlarge their vision of the work necessary, and requested that I assist them with implementing improved data classification methods.
Given the information that we had gathered, we assessed the maturity of the Contoso information protection maturity when considered against various models.
We assessed using models from Gartner and Forrester, as well as using the Microsoft Enterprise Information Management Architecture, and determined the maturity ranking, and a target ranking their could realistically strive for within a short amount of time.
Bringing in a team of SME’s, we determined how IP and information could be protected on-premises, and as the enterprise moved to the cloud. We created a Proof of Concept (POC) that detailed the target state, including a roadmap, value points, and deliverables.
As part of the POC, we provided insight from experts from MSIT about how Microsoft protects information and IP, and showed how Contoso could adapt our processes given their maturing capabilities.
After the POC was delivered, we held a workshop on the next steps. Participants included senior executives, the CSO, business stakeholders, legal, and IT. We were able to deliver a consistent message about implementing the recommended strategy and meeting requirements for information protection while expanding business operations to the cloud.
Innovation is hot. There are a huge number of articles about being innovative; every company wants to think of itself as innovative; consultants warn us that only innovative companies will survive and grow.
But what is innovation, and how can IT participate in a central and valuable way?
This post, written by Stephen Kell, explores these topics.
I believe the main characteristics of innovation are new ways of doing things that help an organization or community realize more value from strategies and investments.
For a company, benefits could be either greater efficiency, new revenue streams, or improved brand perception. For a not-for-profit organization, innovation could produce benefits that increase social impact and the value of services provided to a community.
In order to manage innovation ideas, I categorize innovation into three different types:
Continuous Service Improvement Innovation
Technology-Led Innovation
Business Innovation
Small changes or improvements which can have huge impacts on the cost and quality of service delivery
Cross-Industry technology mega-trends that have emerged to offer potential business value
New business models based on new value propositions, disruptive new entrants, technology disruptors.
Can be organizational, process, systems, or facilities.
Industry and market trends, drivers and disruptors and their business impact
Innovation distinguishes business from competition
By categorizing types of innovation, we can apply different processes to the different types of innovation.
Continuous Service Improvement
This type of innovation can come from anyone within the organization and the ideas are often collected by an ideas hub, enabling people to vote for the ideas. The ideas are then passed to a panel from IT and the business to decide whether to move forward with the ideas.
If the idea goes into production then the business often makes a token award to the innovator. These ideas are often small changes but can have a huge impact on the bottom line, making it worthwhile to collect the ideas and sift through them in order to find the real gems.
Technology Led Innovation
Technology Led Innovation is based on new technologies which are potentially disruptive. The IT organization monitors new and potentially disruptive technologies and assesses impact to the business. When valuable technologies are identified, they are then used to create a proof of concept. In order to realise full value, an enterprise will need to create a business change program to accompany the technology project.
This type of innovation is where the most value is derived, but also the most risk encountered. Here, business models are developed around new technology or new value propositions. Companies pursuing business innovation are seeking value propositions that are fundamentally different from that of their competitors. Innovative ideas end up at the board level, although initial ideas can come from anywhere in the company.
An example of a technology led business innovation is eBay, which imitates auction houses but with a different, more accessible business model.
A useful book that discusses this type of business innovation is “Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant,” W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Harvard Business School Press, ISBN: 1591396190.
Companies are very dependent on technology in order to perform their business. The CIO should, therefore, be a key member of the executive management and be seen to be one of the leaders of business strategy and innovation.
However, all too often the CIO and IT department are seen to be the providers of infrastructure, a view that may inhibit innovation because of business restrictions to help ensure security and system integrity.
In order for the CIO and his IT department to be seen as a valued business partner, the CIO has to demonstrate how IT is adding real value to the business by business innovation. Otherwise the CIO may be side-lined as just a provider of infrastructure services, and the business will look for other sources of innovation to add value. Sometimes enterprises even establish rival organizations to IT under a Chief Digital Officer or a Chief Innovation Officer.
Though IT departments sometimes set up “innovation centers,” they all too often stay restricted to testing new technology or upgrades to existing applications or products, with little relevance to the business.
In order to be relevant to the business, innovations have to be linked to business strategy or business initiatives; innovations have to be solutions to business challenges; innovations need to focus on realizing more value from operations, sales, employees, customers, and other facets of the business.
The types of tools that can be useful to drive this relevance and to show the value of the innovations are:
These techniques are useful for demonstrating the relevance of innovations to a business and the value generated from innovations.
When discussing creativity or innovation, one mantra is “think outside the box.” However, I would instead agree with Luc de Brabandere (Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity, Random House, ISBN-10: 055384119X), who advocates thinking in different boxes.
Brabandere points out that people think in structures and models, not in a vacuum. Therefore a person’s thinking is bounded by the box that he or she is thinking in. In order to be truly innovative or creative a person needs to think in a different box.
The Beatles, one of the most creative bands that shaped the music we listened to for decades after they split up, thought about music in many boxes, including a new one that combined Indian music with jazz and blues. The band embraced the diversity of different cultures to come up with something truly innovative.
Similarly, by embracing the diversity of their employees, rather than trying to fit them to a mold, organizations can become more innovative. Organizations can find different boxes by challenging the way they look at themselves and exploring if there are other ways of categorizing themselves.
Innovation is the life-blood of an organization that wants to grow. But innovation must be linked to business value to be effective. Technology is one of the key drivers behind innovation and the CIO must be one of the innovation leaders in partner with the business. The business and IT leaders should not challenge the organization to think outside the box but rather provide pointers to different boxes that employees can think within to innovate in valuable ways.