"It's often the employees--rather than outside consultants--who know a company's products and processes best. According to management experts, many of the most innovative companies tend to solicit ideas from staff throughout the organization, not just the executive ranks."
-Rachel Emma Silverman, "For Bright Ideas, Ask the Staff", The Wall Street Jorunal, October 17, 2011.
XOOPS Community voted and the winners of 2008/2009 "Marcello Brandao XOOPS Innovation Award" have been announced:
"Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents."
"This new environment also has big implications for managers. Simply put, bosses must be prepared to give up some control. With testing so cheap, easy and accessible, there's less need to ration it as they have in the past. Managers used to directing the company's innovation efforts must give their workers the freedom to come up with ideas on their own and pursue them without lots of red tape."
"Some of the best experiments come from outside the chain of command."
"Not only do we expect managers to solicit and welcome more ideas from lower down in the ranks, we expect that lots more people will be invited to review experiments and make changes."
-Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Schrage, "The New, Faster Face of Innovation", The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2009
Silicon.com: Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas and while those that are generated may not be all IT-related, it will do the CIO no harm to be seen to be leading on innovation.
I don't have the complete answer to this but I would like to throw out some thoughts about how to collect those new ideas:"
Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation. The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.
Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies. Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.
What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.
As the two companies started working together, the gulf between them quickly became apparent. In April, when actress Salma Hayek unveiled an ambitious promotion for P&G's Pampers brand, the Google team was stunned to learn that Pampers hadn't invited any "motherhood" bloggers -- women who run popular Web sites about child-rearing -- to attend the press conference.
"Where are the bloggers?" asked a Google staffer in disbelief, according one person present.
For their part, P&G employees gasped in surprise during a Tide brand meeting when a Google job-swapper apparently didn't realize that Tide's signature orange-colored packaging is a key part of the brand's image.
I'm one of those people that get nervous when I see two opposing cultures trying to connect with each other. I am much more comfortable to read about such stories in the safe confines of my home office. I also get a little giddy when I hear of success in the bridging of two enterprise cultures. I wonder if Google would ever like to swap one of their employees for my federal IT job? I could use a little bit of innovation know how...
Opinion: Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?
There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.
XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.
So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.
"We’re now at the point where the most innovative technology for users really is being created in the nonbusiness space. Corporate IT has become the prisoner of legacy technology, and the result isn’t just stodginess — we’re missing out on innovation that could make our users more productive, more effective and more successful."
--Frank Hayes, "Prisoners of Legacy", ComputerWorld, January 7, 2008
Similar insights have been standard wisdom on the manufacturing floor for decades. Factory managers learn about bottlenecks through the formal discipline of queuing theory. That teaches them to keep a little slack in the system to handle the unpredictable -- but inevitable -- crunch times.
"But where would we be without the information technology workers whose vision and drive made those technologies come to life within their corporations?
It's a question that chief information officers find themselves asking more often these days. Indeed, CIOs are staring at a future with an aging workforce, a shrinking number of computer science students and an intensifying competition for information technology talent."
As I have mentioned in the past, besides this site I also run WebCMS Forum. The forum is a place I started in hopes of bringing users of various content management systems (CMS) together for exciting discussion. While the number of users participating in actual dicussion have always been low, those people that are posting often write something that makes hosting this underused forum well worth my time.
This week I had a user, Anti, talk about frustrations with rapid changes currently happening with the content management system, Drupal. Don't get her wrong, she likes Drupal. However, for the first time in a long while, she is in need of taking a deep breath before absorbing all the new changes into her routine. At the forum she writes:
It seems like such a short time ago, in reality maybe six months or so, that I felt I at least had a finger on the pulse of Drupal. I knew where each off the settings were and was never intimidated by the concept of taxonomy and I was happy as can be. While none of that has really changed, I can still install and configure a Drupal site in record time, I am sometimes completely overwhelmed by the explosion of new ideas I find on Drupal.org. It is all very exciting but after watching this thing for a couple of years I suddenly feel out of sorts. Things really do seem to be happening right now.
While the above post is specifically focused on Drupal, it is not a stretch for me to say that about every user of information technology (IT) has felt overwhelmed when rapid changes take place with the products they are using. These changes take place in the name of innovation. These changes bring features in a product that promise to make our life easier. And if the changes don't make our life easier, the changes still appear to be necessary to get the product in the direction it needs to go. As IT professionals we understand the need for progress, but this understanding doesn't really address the impact the new demands have on our users.
"I’m reading a research paper [PDF] by Nicholas Economides (NYU) and Evangelos Katsamakas (Fordham) called “Linux vs. Windows: A comparison of application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary software platforms.” Long title, but the conclusion of the paper is relatively brief:
In our model, firms and developers invest to improve the quality of the platform or the application and expand the demand by users of these software products. When the operating system is proprietary, the platform provider and the application provider invest only in their own product to maximize their profit. When the operating system is open source, there is no platform provider firm, but the users invest in the platform to maximize their user surplus and their development reputation, which depends on the success of the platform measured by its adoption."
