I find it really hard to believe any country can claim 52 percent of their organizations have created a new group focused on innovation, but if it’s true Canadian CIOs might want to plan a visit to Iberia.
A presentation from Phil Carter, vice-president of IDC European Research, was recently uploaded to SlideShare by Oracle, which used him as a speaker for some its recent events. This included a special session in Iberia, so some of the findings are localized. However there’s lots of interesting stats and ideas that could be useful to Canadian CIOs, too.
For example, the deck suggests that becoming more innovative essentially requires CIOs to focus on three things:
1. Cultivate tomorrow’s IT talent today (Think enterprise architects, who will be hard to find)
2. Deliver the technology the way the business wants (and if not, you’re probably already failing)
3. Move outside your process comfort zone
That last one will probably the be big one, of course, which Carter’s presentation suggests will not just be about automating business processes but creating actual IT-enabled products.
Best slide in here, though, is No. 10, which offers a familiar but still interesting staircase image to show the CIO’s journey from “ad-hoc” technology projects all the way to “optimized,” which is where IDC suggests real business transformation is taking place. This might not be a bad thing to keep as a screensaver, because for many CIOs, it will probably be less of a one-way journey than one step forward, two steps back. In the end, though, I think most of them will get there.
