Henry

"The boundary between where a product ends and where a customer begins is changing."
-John J. Sviokla, Vice Chairman, DiamondCluster International Inc.

Bringing Innovation 101: Unlearn everything you know about Innovation

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” - Gloria Steinem

In spite of getting a place in vision statement of every organization and spoken by every CEOs, organizations do very little to bring the innovation in a true sense.

The important thing which stops us from bringing innovation is what we know as Innovation is not innovation.

Unlearning everything we know as innovation, is the first step to innovate.

#1: Innovation is Big

We all taught “Innovation is Big”,

This very thinking makes innovation expensive.

To become an innovative company, YOU NEED NOT TO INVENT THE NEXT BIG THING, PERIOD.

As Hugh Macleod, mentioned in How To Be Creative, "The idea (Innovation) doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world" 

Anything which brings a small improvement in a way we (especially our customers) do things is INNOVATION.

#2: Innovation is an activity

Most of us think that innovation is an activity, which is need massive investment in terms of resources, to make it worst, many think that it's a non billable activity.

Believe me, Innovation is not an activity, IT JUST A WAY OF THINKING 

Create a culture, Bring defined innovative processes like Design Driven Development(D3), innovation will flourish.

#3: We need Innovators

Innovation is not belong to a set of people or set of skills

Everyone can innovate

"Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten", Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative

YOU NEED NOT TO HIRE ANY NEW TALENTS.

All you need is a leader, a leader, who can bring the best from people, who can create a culture of innovation

The same Apple, which created  some breakthrough products , was struggled to innovate when Steve Jobs left Apple during 1997.

Every organization needs someone to drive the innovation, this is exactly what Bill Gates do at Microsoft as a Chief Architect.

"Before you can be creative, you must be courageous."
-Joey Reiman, CEO, BrightHouse

Enterprise 3.0: Rise of Application Intelligence

As defined by Ross Mayfield and Andrew McAfee, if the Enterprise 2.0 is “use of freeform social software within companies.”, I like to define what I call Enterprise 2.0, as Enterprise 3.0: The Rise of Application Intelligence.

• Intelligence
• Flexibility and
• Ability to evolve

Will be the key of these next generation systems s

Some of the factors which going to drive these changes are

• Conceptual change in data storage and retrieval techniques
• Recent success of Meta-programming languages
• Rise of Domain specific languages

Enterprise 3.0 is going to redefine, the way our software behave, and they way we store and retrieve information and the way we develop software

References:

The four application pillars of enterprise 3.0
Enterprise 2.0 vs. SOA
Enterprise 2.0, SoA And The Freeform Advantage
The Enterprise 2.0 industry discussion continues and evolves

"I am right until I find an alternative"

Enterprise 2.0: Behind the Hype

Enterprise 2.0 is an evolving concept about the next generation enterprise software solutions. Since the name coined after the Web 2.0 and focuses on collaboration, many think that, implementing Web 2.0 (Blogs and Wiki) in enterprise is Enterprise 2.0.

Even though both share the common thread in terms of collaboration and social network, I believe Enterprise 2.0, is much bigger than blogs and wikis in enterprise.

From a long term strategic point of view, Enterprise 2.0 is an opportunity to

• build an enterprise wide collaborative platform
• build integrated meta model and centralised data store
• re-imagine the way application behave

From a solution point of view, Enterprise 2.0 is about integration, integration of concepts, frameworks, and technologies, this includes

Web 2.0

• Blogs
• Wiki
• RSS
• Folksonomy

Enterprise 2.0

• Service Oriented Architecture
• Workflow Management
• Content Management
• Mashup
• Instant Messaging
• Enterprise Social Networks
• Rule Engine
• Data Versioning
• Time Machine
• Business Intelligence
• Domain specific languages
• VOIP
• Mobile Devices
• Application Intelligence
• Software Agents
• Data aware architecture
• Task based semantic navigation

Some of the related posts are:

Enterprise 3.0: Rise of Application Intelligence

What form will Enterprise 2.0 take?

End of Software As We Know It

Building Next Generation Applications

Application Intelligence

What Is Web 2.0

Enterprise Web 2.0

Enterprise 2.0

My predictions are happening

I felt great this week for two reasons

1) A technology ‘Time Machine’ which I outlined 3 years back after a research titled “Application Intelligence”, is been implemented in Apple’s new ‘Mac OS X Leopard’, that too with a same name.

2) The recently released Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies’, included every aspect of my predictions which I have posted in the last few years.

End of Software As We Know It
Building Next Generation Applications
Application Intelligence

What's special?

IBM is always the first one to ride on the buzz, so far it was ‘on demand business’, now ‘innovation’. Whether this is just one more campaign or a real change in the way they wanted to develop solution is a different question.

However, I like this Ads, it really conveys what I want a software solution provider should do 'making our client, special'

IBM also has an interesting survey 'Global CEO Study 2006', as part of this 'innovation' campaign

“I don’t think there’s anything worse than being ordinary.”
—Angela (Mena Suvari), American Beauty

Bringing Innovation 101: Managers to Leaders

Software development is not as simple as A + B = C, It is more a collaborative effort of different skills.

As someone said “Building great software is easy: build a great team and they'll make the software for you.”. Building a team is not a managerial job. 

There is an interesting comparison between managers and leaders in their article titled “Are you a manager or leader?”

MANAGERS administer are a copy maintain systems/structure focus control short-term how/when bottom line imitate accept good soldier do things right

LEADERS innovate are an original develop people focus trust long-range what/why horizon originate challenge own person do the right thing

As you can see, it's clear that, what we need leaders not managers. Unfortunately, apart from making every other aspect of the software development unimportant, including quality of code, maintainability and usability, etc., delivery focused approach makes a process based managerial environment, which is completely opposite of the people based environment.

Managers might be good option for a process based controlled environment such as manufacturing, but defiantly not suited for software development.

As quoted by Azim Premji in his memo “Why employees leave organizations” 

Largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called First Break All The Rules.

It came up with this surprising finding:

If you're losing good people, look to their immediate supervisor. More than any other single reason, he is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why they quit, taking their knowledge, experience and contacts with them. Often, straight to the competition. "People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. "So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people - in the form of better pay, better perks and better training - when, in the end, turnover is mostly manager issue." If you have a turnover problem, look first to your managers. Are they driving people away? Beyond a point, an employee's primary need has less to do with money, and more to do with how he's treated and how valued he feels. Much of this depends directly on the immediate manager. And yet, bad bosses seem to happen to good people everywhere.

Innovation can happen only by empowering people, not by following a defined set of processes.

All you need to empower people is Leaders, not Managers.

Here is, what you can do, as an organization

1) Hire Good Leaders
2) Upgrade your Managers to Leaders
3) Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes. - Phil Daniels