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Defining The Business Value Of Technology
By Lou Bertin
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t's a dangerous business to disagree with Jim Cash. Should the debate remain academic, there
are his professional credentials to deal with: professor at the Robison School of Business at
Harvard, InformationWeek columnist, member of seven boards of directors, author, and advisor to
enterprises large and small. Should the debate turn livelier, there is his status as a failed NBA
power forward, a failure that -- as those who have met him in the flesh will attest --is not due
to any lack of physical stature.
Yet disagree I will with an observation Professor Cash voiced at the InformationWeek
Conference two weeks in Amelia Island, Florida. In his concluding remarks, he observed that the
title of CIO should come to stand for "Chief Innovation Officer" rather than its current "Chief
Information Officer" designation or its previous "Career Is Over" denigration.
Cash is off the mark on this one, in my opinion, because the duties assigned to any "Chief
Innovation Officer" would be too great for a single individual to bear. Running a Fortune 5
company or the government of any nation one cares to name (no jokes, please, about how our
sitting president has spent his time administering to the latter) would pale in comparison to the
workload a Cash-defined CIO would face in any enterprise, save for a one-person shop.
That lesson, I think, was borne out by the near-universal comments from participants and
attendees at the InformationWeek Conference. The process of applying technology for
sustainable competitive advantage has long since moved away from simply using the newest,
fastest and "best of breed" technologies because of their sheer performance advantages.
InformationWeek's readers have been preaching that gospel for some time now, as they did most
recently in our August 24 "Brave New World" editorial package.
Never, however, was it made more clear than it was at our recent gathering that simply
exploiting technology is no longer enough. Randall Mott, senior vice president and
current-definition CIO at Wal-Mart Stores gave voice to the prevailing trend by paraphrasing
Vince Lombardi and saying, "innovation is everything."
At a time when there are no staggering new technologies on the horizon and when the
business-driven technology innovations of a year ago have since been reverse-engineered and, as
such, become commodities, the gift of innovation becomes the rarest and most valuable of
assets.
Yet innovation for innovation's sake remains a mere nostrum for enterprises: a feel-good placebo
that rearranges the furniture a bit but accomplishes nothing in the way of improving the overall
structure of the operation.
True innovation - innovation that can be propagated throughout an organization and produces
quantifiable results - can and should come from any source, hence the difficulty in assigning any
single individual as "Innovation Czar" as our friend Mr. Cash would have it.
Innovation can manifest iteself in many ways. It can be imposed, such as when a company has to
create new processes to meet new government regulations or changing business conditions, says
E.P. Rogers, CIO of Mutual of New York. It can also flow organically, being part and parcel of
what's expected of the IT staff, says Jim Hatch, CIO at Case Corp. It can percolate from the
ground up, as in an inventory management systems improvement that was suggested by a store
cashier, says Ron Griffin, senior VP, IS at The Home Depot. Or it can be made part of the table
stakes for those who wish to join the game, as it has become in Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s IT
organization, according to Joe Smialowski, the retailer's CIO.
Chief Information Officers all, Messrs. Rogers, Hatch, Griffin and Smialowski explained at the
conference how innovation - and the resulting change - is like fission: dangerous, tough to
harness, and unbelievably potent when applied properly.
Innovation, like fission, must also be aimed at a specific objective or set of objectives, they
said. The competitive landscape is such that some experimentation is necessary, but too much
experimentation isn't tolerable. Also like fission and its effects, innovation surrounds us; All
we need do is become attuned to what it is and how it is part of the literal stuff of life.
Given the myriad sources of innovation within an enterprise and the plethora of potential targets
for those innovations great and small, it is too great a responsibility for any one person to
undertake. However, we need look only to the corporate models cited above - and the hundreds
like them - to see how innovation can and should be managed.
As Einstein said about the explanations of phenomena, they should be "as simple as possible and
no simpler." So, too, it is with managing innovation, where the simplest approach is best and the
tests of efficacy are far more efficient than the dictates of a single individual.
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