&Teaming Up to Crack

Innovation

EnterpriseIntegration

IDEAIN BRIEF

“ Key Growth imperatives succeed best when specialized teams share skills, experience, and insight across silos. “

• IT has long been a catalyst of business innovation and essential to cross-functional integration efforts.

• A Distributed Innovated Group(DIG) combines a company’s own innovation efforts with the best of external technology to create new business variations. The Enterprise Integration Group (EIG) folds yesterday’s new variations into operating model of the enterprise.

• These two groups help better identify, co-ordinate, and prioritize the most-promising projects and spread technology, tools, and best practices across the enterprise.

IDEAIN BRIEF

DistributedInnovation Group

Nobody has monopoly on innovation in large companies anymore. No organizational unit can be the innovator.

What a DistributedInnovation GroupDoes

What a DistributedInnovation GroupIs Not

• Scouts for new ideas and untapped potential in current technologies.

• Scans the external environment for emerging technologies.

• Facilitates participation in idea forums.

• Acts as a center of innovation expertise.

• Publicizes promising innovations.

• Funds and serves as an incubator for promising innovations.

• An R&D group dedicated to product and technological discovery.

• A monopoly innovation function charged with enacting all stages of the innovation process.

• A systems-development or corporate-venturing unit.

• An office-bound centralized staff unit that sets policy and monitors performance.

IDEAIN PRACTICE

IT’s role inFostering Innovation

• Up-to-date understanding of emerging technologies and insight into trends.

• Mastery of iterative and experimental application development methods, including creation of robust business simulations.

• Facility with information dissemination and collaboration technologies.

• Providing technology tools and infrastructure to support innovation initiatives.

• Providing skilled technical people for all substantial innovation initiatives, to help optimize product design and anticipate scaling issues.

• Rapidly incorporating the new innovation’s information into corporate infrastructure.

IDEAIN BRIEF

EnterpriseIntegration GroupCustomers today expect responsive product development, order fulfillment, service, and

administrative backup. That requires a company’s operations to be coordinated and internally transparent.

What a EnterpriseIntegration GroupDoes

What a EnterpriseIntegration GroupIs Not

• Manages the corporate portfolio of integration initiatives.

• Serves as the corporation’s center of expertise in process management and improvement.

• Provides staff to major business-integration initiatives.

• Is responsible for enterprise architecture.

• Anticipates how ops might work in a more integrated fashion in future.

• The implementation unit for enterprise processes.

• A unit available for process-redesign project.

• Solely a systems development unit.

IntegrationCapabilities Needed

IDEAIN BRIEF

IDEAIN PRACTICE

IT’s role inSupporting Integration

• Familiarity with concepts and methods of business process design.

• Experience with cross-functional systems implementation.

• Competence in analyzing architecture.

• Expertise in Information Management.

• Experience with program management.

• A talent for relationship management.

Three Technology ManagementImperatives

The success of DIGs and EIGs depends on more than technological skills. It demands a comprehensive IT management strategy and infrastructure consisting of three elements.

IDEAIN BRIEF

Innovation meetsIntegration

IDEAIN BRIEF

Multifaceted roles.

Neither group direct solutions.

Networking is an essential activity for both – build relationship with internal change agents, external partners and stakeholders.

Both groups need to focus on adding customer value.

Members of the group must be trilingual – business language, able to understand and translate the language of IT and at ease with natural language of sociability.

Members drawn from business and after a few years return to operational roles.

In both cases, guaranteed funding makes a difference.

Despite their commonalities, the two units operate in different spheres.

A COMPANY PURSUING GROWTH MUST EXCEL AT BOTH.

Discussion based on the topic published in the Nov 2008 issue ofHarvard Business Review

SOUTH ASIA

Teaming Up to Crack Innovationand Enterprise Integration, Pg 64James I. Cash. Jr., Michael J. Earl, and Robert Morisonwww.hbrasia.org