Who Drives Innovation: IT, the Business or Both? | Service ...

Innovation is critical to business success, but IT and business execs need to work together

Who?s responsible for spurring innovation? Is it the IT organization, the business side or a combo of the two? It?s an interesting question and one that was question raised by a comment on the IT?s Innovation Call to Arms post over on our corporate Perspectives blog.

The original post was the result of a series CA.com poll questions around innovation. The first asked, ?What IT trend is the biggest driver of innovation at the respondent?s business?? Of the four choices, ??Anything-as-a-Service? easily bested Consumerization of IT, Collaboration and Knowledge Management, and Business Analytics. The second poll?s results showed that half of respondents are increasing IT investment in innovation, while a third poll showed lack of necessary budget as the main impediment. ?As the original post says, the poll data shows that IT leaders know they have and want to drive innovation.

On the flip side, Steve, the comment author, argues, ?? widespread IT-fostered business innovation won?t occur until the business views IT as a source of business innovation and as a strategic enterprise asset.?

So who is right? My belief is that there ultimately needs to be cooperation and a shared vision for innovation between business and IT leaders. It?s the only way true innovation can happen over the long term.

But, that doesn?t mean IT is dead in the water until the business side of the house comes around to seeing its true value as an innovator. Given the demands placed on IT by new technologies like ?Anything-as-a-Service? and users that expect flawless experiences with every interaction, IT must innovate some way, somehow.

IT can do it by realizing the benefits of tools like application performance management, agile cloud delivery and service virtualization, which can help reduce the time needed to find and fix problems, perform manual maintenance tasks by automating them and test new services more efficiently.? IT organizations can then use this new-found time on innovating rather than repetitive tasks that don?t add value.

Plus, IT can skunkwork innovative projects it knows will be valuable but may not quite have full buy-in from the business side. Kind of like the Apple engineer that was let go after his project was cancelled, but decided to sneak into the office every day to finish anyway. IT organizations that want and know it has to innovate can take on the can-do/will-do attitude of Ron Avitzur in an effort to prove that it can innovate and that the business side must partner with it to do so.

As the clich? goes, it?s a win-win for everyone.

Who drives innovation in your organization? Leave a comment below or tweet your answer to @jmeserve.

About Jason Meserve

Jason Meserve has been working in high-tech for nearly 15 years. He built his tech resume in the 10 years he spent as a journalist at Network World, where he created everything from articles, features, blogs, videos and podcasts. Mr. Meserve is currently a Sr. Product Marketing Manager for the Service Assurance Customer Solutions Group where he focuses on Application Performance Management. Mr. Meserve has also held marketing and editorial positions at Constant Contact and Application Development Trends.

Source: http://www.serviceassurancedaily.com/2012/07/who-drives-innovation-it-the-business-or-both/

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