For CIOs (IT Directors in the UK) and IT Managers, innovation matters. Usually they have two primary responsibilities; to support or promote business innovation and to keep the IT operations running efficiently and economically. In time I’ll cover both of these wide areas of activity, but today I’m more interested in the first.

As information technology embeds itself ever more deeply in the activities of a business, IT executives are increasingly finding that IT is no longer their sole domain and their department needs to partner with the other departments on an equal footing. IT projects become business projects and IT skills intermingle with various business skills. Things aint what they used to be. A sea change occurred which began with the advent of the ubiquitous PC and accelerated with the Internet. So the days of the IT fiefdoms gradually came to an end.
In many organizations, IT now needs to repeatedly demonstrate its relevance and it can only do this effectively by delivering business benefit. In operational matters, it is likely to be on the defensive, even if it is doing well. People only tend to notice how well systems are managed when there are problems. However when new business capabilities are prompted and successfully implemented by IT, everyone notices. IT executives are quite capable of making contributions in this way and sometimes do.

Let me give you an example. Pinnacle Insurance PLC, sells unemployment insurance along with other insurance products. When the Internet became ubiquitous, the IT Director of the company, Tony Piper, saw an opportunity. The thinking was simple. If you reduce the time between becoming unemployed and getting employed then you reduce the cost of claims. So Tony set up and built a web site specifically designed to assist policy holders who had become redundant to get jobs. It was a simple idea, although not entirely simple to execute, because it involved aggregating information from many job sites.

Neither is this the only innovation he has introduced. He noticed, from statistics of policy holders that about 20 percent of them had provided mobile phone numbers. Also he was aware that a good percentage of calls to the Pinnacle call centre were simply a customer request to know when a claims payment was to be made. He has therefore implemented a project to pre-empt some of the call centre traffic by notifying customers about the progress of any claim through SMS messaging. The benefit is a simple cost reduction. An SMS message costs about 5 pence and calls to the call centre cost about £2.50. The potential cost saving is high.

Both of these ideas are ‘obvious in retrospect’ but far more likely to come from an IT executive who was keeping his eye on the needs of the business than any other member of the management team. Neither of these projects involved a large investment and they stood a chance of delivering business benefit quickly. This is the kind of thing that IT directors can do to gain positive visibility.

IT executives are far better placed than other members of the management team for coming up with ideas like this, as long as they keep an eye on the way that the IT industry is evolving. Despite the dot com collapse, new ideas and products still appear regularly both from the US and in Europe. For the sake of credibility, the IT executive needs to be well informed about them. However, I would advocate that he or she needs to become a direct channel for helping fellow executives to understand what is and is not possible with current technologies. To be proactive rather than reactive. The major business projects for most organizations will rarely originate in the IT Department, and the IT Department cannot afford to be seen as a barrier to such initiatives. Better that it keeps other departments well informed than it has to oppose ideas that are sound in business terms but immature in technology terms.

In future columns, I will be reviewing a variety of technologies with the specific idea of highlighting their business relevance. It should prove interesting, it may even prove useful.