Interop Las Vegas this week featured a 2-day workshop for aspiring CIOs and one presenter described how CIOs can actively and effectively promote innovation within their organizations. Nationwide Financial Services CIO Emeritus Bruce Barnes says a big part of the formula is quite simple: people do what you pay them to do.First and foremost, Barnes says, CIOs must "be seen as a credible individual when speaking on innovation, which means that you have to change the language from being an IT guy to being a businessman, or a businesslady. You have to know the world in which you live: the industry, the competition, and your own business, and you have to speak that language to gain the credibility of knowledge."

The link above is to a 2-minute video clip of Barnes' comments on innovation, sent to Global CIO by our friends at Riverbed.

Barnes describes some methods he employed at Nationwide Financial, ranging from assigning a small set of individuals to focus all of their time on finding and evaluating innovative technologies and processes, to incorporating varying levels of responsibility for the quest for innovation into every employee's performance evaluation.

The topic was part of the broad mix of business and technology issues reviewed in Interop's two-day CIO Boot Camp, which drew about 150 people, according to Interop General Manager Lenny Heymann. This was the fourth year Interop has hosted the CIO-centric workshop, Heymann said, and this year's crowd was the largest yet.

With other sessions at the Interop event driving home the point that the wide range of business transformations taking place today will be built in large part on parallel IT transformations, the CIO Boot Camp provided an ideal environment for current and aspiring IT executives to gain greater insight into how they can gain greater business acumen while also remaining up to date on the latest IT trends and strategies.