Regardless of the innovation strategy your organization has adopted, and no matter what kind of innovations you have decided to pursue, you will almost always have to deal with information technology professionals at some time during the process.
Information technology is now a central and critical driver of production in almost all industries, from those which are dominated by industrial age economics to the emerging innovation economy companies that are taking the lead now.
As a result, information technology can be considered either a necessary evil that prevents things getting done or, alternatively, a massive enabler of competitive advantage and worker productivity. Perspectives vary depending on the way an IT organization deals with change on a day to day basis.
No matter how the information technology group is perceived, there is a key thing that those responsible for innovation will find impossible to avoid: the massive emphasis that most IT professionals will place on minimizing change. There are excellent reasons they do this, though it is obviously an anathema to innovators, whose whole role in life is to create productive, valuable change.
IT organizations will likely have change teams, in fact, whose purpose is to make it as hard as possible to change anything. They rationalize this using throw away lines such as “up-time is our number one priority” or “protecting service”. For those times when they are unable to get out of making a change, they will ensure there are any number of gates and governance processes that are designed to make things as difficult as possible. As difficult as possible, at least, for the innovators.
Innovation teams have an answer in a disciplined focus of the rigors of Innovation Management. They provide a positive way to manage technologists in an organization, because they create a set of tools and processes that demonstrate value to technologists as well as innovators. They enable the team to show that change is in the best interests of the organization, and, more often than not, in the interests of IT as well.
For more help with innovation management to support Information Technology, James Gardner has written an online innovation book, available at no cost as a resource to the community.