What are the Top Reasons that Fail Innovation in IT Organizations

Often old IT thinking cannot move fast enough in the age of the digitalization.

An IT organization has three dimensions to focus on: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Agility. Often time the focus is on the first one where the last two support innovation. So what are the top reasons that kill innovation and value creation in IT organization?

Traditional business culture: How to create and grow a start-up spirit inside people in a large organization? Because only people can drive innovation, change and create value. How to build the conditions inside an IT organization and use social business, cloud, and agile approach to making it happen? The aspects of change management and how change makes people feel are important considerations for any innovation project.

Solely focus on quantifiable benefits or short-term result: Old IT thinking cannot move fast enough in the age of the digitalization. Aside from treating innovation initiatives like typical IT projects that are constrained by quick ROI, the emotional obstacles for innovation are significant in large, mainstream organizations.

Outdated Methodology: The traditional waterfall methods are not sufficient anymore. Large programs should be broken up into shorter deliverables which don't mean that there should be an ROI for each deliverable. IT needs to embrace a more agile development with deliverables rolling in the shorter delivery cycle, to encourage IT and business to try out new ideas, learn from what is working and what doesn't, and improve the deliverables in the next iteration.

Excessive IT complexity: Complication limits innovation and historical lack of success in IT project compounds the situation. It is due to analysis paralysis, narrow thinking - not leveraging the collective brainpower of strategic vendor partnerships, and it is also a lack of understanding the capabilities/resources, lack of business/IT understanding and lack of outside-in approaches as well.

Lack of the alignment of people, process, and technology:  Lack of buy-in and executive sponsorship, the innovation is not goal-congruent with corporate goals; lack of expertise to deliver, lack of  resources, early termination / budget cutting for initiatives, redesign of goals, "square pegs in round holes" syndrome, and in the longer term, a lower prioritization for such initiatives; or assumptions are made that by simply undertaking the innovation, without setting the effective processes and the latest technology for systematic innovation management.

Therefore, IT needs to move up the maturity level, in pursuit of effectiveness and agility by having governance in place, with a long-term focus, to enable value creation initiatives, agility and endeavors for managing innovation.  

Posted in: Agile,Digital Pitfalls,Innovation,IT Innovation,IT Transformation,Lessons from Failures