Digital Innovation – Develop Your Innovation Agenda

Observations

The CIO is pivotal to the practice of innovation in modern organisations because their role operates at the intersection of technology, strategy, and leadership. By driving digital transformation, fostering a culture of innovation, and aligning technology with business goals, CIOs enable modern organisations to remain competitive and forward-thinking in an increasingly digital landscape.

The following observations are a list of tangible actions that organisations can take to create and deliver an innovation framework.

Governance

To establish an innovation practice, and in addition to previous IBRS advice, we advise that the CIO:

• Establish an innovation committee tasked with reviewing innovation proposals for further investigation and executive consideration. The committee should report to the organisational leadership team.
• Establish a working group under the innovation committee to research and seek from partners, such as vendors, universities, TAFEs, and the innovation community, the potential opportunities new technology offers to the organisation. These potential partners may also be able to enhance and confirm use cases. Too much of an internal focus risks the situation of ‘we only know what we know’.
• Deploy small, agile teams to assess, partner with, and deliver MVPs on use cases that have passed first approval, inclusive of ICT architecture, ICT operations, ICT contract and vendor management, line of business, and a representative from other key central functions such as finance and HR.
• Develop a communications and engagement plan to advertise internally that the organisation has established an innovation practice and is open to considering innovative ideas to improve the organisation’s productivity and customer satisfaction.
• Collaborate and promote visibility – implement an innovation community of practice, which can showcase new ideas and shortlist innovation proposals for the overarching innovation committee. Work closely with internal and external collaborators purely around the development of ideas that allow flexibility that formal procurement may not.

For CIOs:

• Build innovation into business-as-usual (BAU) roles and use existing positions to come together as small teams to conduct analysis and develop use cases. Roles such as business analysts, solution architects, data analysts, and change managers are typically embedded with the business and have a good understanding of the business and the technology.
• Ensure that the people in these roles come together to look for synergies across innovation and the organisation (platforms, customer base, vendors).
• Engage with universities, TAFE, the local innovation and tech community, and vendors to enhance and confirm use cases. Quite often, these groups are already working on ideas that have evolved out of the local community or product customer bases.
• Utilise agile procurement to engage universities, TAFE and the local tech industry. Work closely with your organisational procurement team to collectively allow this collaboration. Don’t be afraid to review policy in this regard, as it is often dated and not reflective of modern digital operating models.
• Many organisations have existing partners and vendors in technology and services. Look for innovation opportunities with these partners and regularly schedule innovation into meetings. Timeliness of procurement of capacity and capability outside of existing vendors can be an issue, so take advantage of what may already exist.
• Innovation can be a catalyst to consider a switch to modern IT operating models. The platform operating model has become more popular to take advantage of investment in large platforms that cater for a variety of business functions, inherently produce native data interoperability, and reduce the need for system integration. These platform vendors often have a multi-national client base and can bring innovative use cases to the table. Some hyperscalers vendors will contribute funding towards SI partners’ charges in exchange for commitments to leverage their platforms.
• Whilst a platform approach is a good way to minimise risk and accelerate the adoption of innovation, continue to encourage people to embrace emerging technology. Use proof of concept methods to test and ensure the involvement of the architecture team to examine how architectures may need to be adjusted.
• Utilise governance via existing IT committees to prioritise use cases and develop the backlog. It is essential to set some budget aside for use case development (BA, business engagement, vendor).
• Undertake good enough architectural analysis. Align to product families and existing platforms. Vendors are upgrading product versions more often as technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) improves rapidly. Their innovation will quickly become part of their standard platform, which is often well-developed and tested.
• Ask how to utilise existing infrastructure for new ideas (Internet of Things (IoT) network, wi-fi, fibre, enterprise platforms). Engage with partners to understand their roadmaps and use cases from elsewhere. Don’t be afraid to take and scale what others have done (especially in government). Innovation does not have to be a brand-new idea; it can be the adoption of what has been done elsewhere.
• Once ideas move to a subsequent stage, usually based on their value to the organisation, assess the capability needed to develop and support the innovation idea. Ensure adjustments are made to workforce plans (e. g. will internal HR suffice, or will it require a partner?).
• In government, engage within your jurisdiction and with others to examine opportunities to reuse solutions and processes already in place. Great synergies exist across technology platforms such as SAP, Service Now, and Microsoft.

Further Considerations

• Suggest different categories for innovation. Organisational structure and function can be a good guide. However, topics such as data, AI, digital twin, platform-base, automation, workflow, and customer will produce additional cross-cutting ideas. Something as simple as building forms and workflow can be a massive step in improving customers’ and staff’s lives.
• A novel way to tease out ideas from staff is to ask, ‘What do they dislike most about their job?’ This is likely to produce ideas and motivation for change. Talk to customers about pain points with efficiency and product.
• Use business engagement and business analysis staff to work closely with the business to re-think processes. This is often a simple form of innovation that can produce quick results.
• Changes to work processes due to new ideas, even if they come from staff, will still require formal change management to ensure data flows, dependencies, and documentation are addressed. The current state versus the desired state and its impact on the workforce is also an issue for change management, as workforce plans and roadmaps may be impacted.
• Involve C-suite stakeholders (COO, CHRO, CISO, CFO) in innovation and ensure their representation in the various governance bodies and processes. Consideration may also need to be given to operational changes, parallel training and development, and legacy asset retirement, in addition to strategic workforce planning.
• Work quickly and agilely to produce proof of concept and a minimum lovable product on the innovation flightpath. This will allow further brainstorming and progress towards a minimum viable product.
• Estimates of budget and timeframe are as important to executives as the product itself. Be especially active in developing these estimates through agile sprints.
• Roles and responsibilities across organisations: IBRS has a previously published view that to own innovation is to risk limiting others’ contributions. Although a CIO is traditionally at the heart of digital innovation, their role in today’s modern operating models is often as a supplier of technology. Innovation is everyone’s responsibility and ultimately, delivery should sit with the relevant part of the business. However, the development of ideas and organisational priority setting is the role of collaborative governance with the right connection and alignment to existing functions such as the organisational budget planning process and digital architecture.

Next Steps

An innovation framework is the first step. IBRS has made suggestions in other advisories (see references). The key is to establish formal executive support and sponsorship from the C-suite for the governance. The next steps are to:

• Develop a communications and engagement plan, inclusive of all stakeholders, internal and external.
• Develop the terms of reference for the governance committees and communities of practice.
• Engage key existing roles in the innovation process and establish clear roles and responsibilities in job descriptions, including measures of success.
• Carefully consider innovation categories. Use organisational pain points of areas of large budgets as starting cases.
• Develop and communicate innovation guidelines to engage staff and stakeholders.
• Develop good enough documentation for governance consideration of ideas. Include innovation categories such as the ones mentioned, such as data, artificial intelligence, digital twin, process, and platforms.

Get started – IBRS is well positioned to facilitate a whiteboard session on applying this advisory to your specific organisation and culture. If there is enough interest, IBRS can also facilitate client round tables on the topic to encourage more collaboration across jurisdictions or industries.

References

‘IBRSiQ: Chief Innovation Officer Job Description’, IBRS, 2022.

‘Practical Innovation – How IBRS Research Can Help You on the Journey – Part 1’, IBRS, 2024.

‘Practical Innovation – How IBRS Research Can Help You On The Journey – Part 2’, IBRS, 2024.

‘CIO Handbook – Part 4’, IBRS, 2022.