The New Book “IT Innovation” Introduction Chapter 1 Reinvent IT as an Innovation Hub

There is no one size fits all formula to run a highly effective and highly innovative IT organization because different IT organizations and the enterprise as whole are at the different stage of the business maturity. Therefore, it’s important for IT leaders to create a comprehensive list of the IT organization’s strengths, weaknesses, goals, and objectives. Digital IT is a paradigm shift in role, responsibility, and attitude. Your goals and objectives will be your drivers. Your strengths and weaknesses will be your constraints. Running IT as an innovation hub means IT can be used as a tool, enabler, catalyzer, and a digital platform to orchestrate change and facilitate idea creation and implementation, meet the ultimate goal of an organization’s short/medium/long-term strategic plans.
Closing the gaps to run innovative IT: Innovation becomes simply creating value by solving simple and complex problems. There are idea gap, process gap, and innovation execution gap, in innovation management. If you have idea gap, it means the root causes are about talent gap and culture gap. The heterogeneous team with cognitive differences is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting. With building a culture of innovation and risk tolerance, people are more open to trying new things and share thoughts and ideas fearlessly. Even you have ample ideas, it doesn’t guarantee innovation success due to the possible execution gap. Bridging innovation execution gap requires a systematic execution scenario with clear stages, performance thresholds, decision-making parameters combined with the iterative learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage. Innovation is not serendipity, it takes a systematic approach with robust, but not overly rigid processes to implement it.
Beware of blind sport in IT innovation: At the dawn of the digital era, with information abundance and disruptive forces of technology, IT often gets criticized because it does not deliver value to the business and its focus is not on the business where it should be. It results in a team that has to spend all their time to “keep the lights on,” rather than focusing on developing strategies that advance the business and give them a competitive edge in the marketplace. If IT organizations are going to move up the maturity curve, they have to be aware of a variety of blind spots. They must alleviate themselves of the mundane, daily tasks that weight them down. High performance cannot be achieved unless the IT department improves their act and must engage the business, not the geek in the tech tower. IT must engage the business more to avoid blind spots and bridge the gaps.
From transactional IT vs. transformational IT: Generally speaking,  transactional refers to operational transactions, taking an input at one one and churning it out at the other with the process in between. Transformational means redesigning existing transactions to something new, being innovative and creative and also introducing completely new transactions hopefully with a strategy that serves the organization well. The pace of changes in IT will force more and more CIOs into transformation-oriented roles, creating business value is what is expected from CIOs. A transformation often needs to break down the outdated rules, to focus on innovation. It requires first shifting mindsets, and then building new skills and reinforcing and embedding new practices and reflexes. And a transformational CIO is innovative, influential and intellectual.
Ideologically, the highly effective and highly dynamic digital organizations, no matter large or small, have a multitude of positive characteristics: the startup’s business culture - innovative and dynamic; the well-established organization’s structure and expertise; the institute’s learning attitude and agility, as the speed of knowledge life cycle is accelerated. TO reinvent IT, it’s not about controlling, but take more resource to do innovation, not just IT innovation, but business innovation and strengthen the business as a whole to make a leap in the digital transformation.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu