How much innovation and R&D does your project IT organization perform?
My 13-year experience has been primarily at Microsoft, where we performed a signficant amount of innovation and R&D in engineering and such. For the past two years, however, I've been in project IT. The two organizations I have worked in perform 0 (zero, none) and little innovation or R&D (respectively).
I may be tainted by my experience at Microsoft (do ya think?), but my take on this is that no IT organization can increase its effectiviness or its efficiency without exploring and innovating. The feeling I get is that most companies view IT as a 'turn the crank' process and give short schrift to the idea that their IT department could learn to do things faster, better, or both. Besides, most engineers yearn for the chance to grown and be challenged--employee retention is improved when people are given a chance to develop themselves.
In your IT organizations, how much innovation or R&D do you perform? I'm especially interested in concepts like exploring development/test methodologies, design and integration of infrastructure tools like build management, test automation harnesses and frameworks, etc.
I truly believe that an IT organization needs to view itself as a software development company. No technology company can afford to stand still and ignore process improvement, talent development, and the likes. It's incumbant upon an IT organization to develop the ability to drop better software, faster. This may not be the prevailing thought at the C-level, but what about people in the LinkedIn community? Do you think I'm over-emphasizing the role of innovation?
Finally, if you do have innovation or R&D in your organization, about how much effort is devoted to it? 5%? 10%? More?
Thanks in advance,
John O.
http://thoughtsonqa.blogspot.com
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Louis R
louis(at)r2computing.com; Business Technology Coach, Author of NearlyFreeIT.com
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Innovation is more about a company mindset than anything formalized. Either you encourage your employees to come up with new solutions and improvements or you tell them to shut-up and do their jobs. I have always run my company with the attitude that anyone can propose a new idea, process, invention, whatever to me and, if they have thought it out and developed a realistic deployment plan, and it doesn't cost a fortune, I am willing to try just about anything.
For example, my Chief Engineer came to me recently with an idea to develop a consumer electronics device. Since we had just about everything he needed and the cost for the prototype was about $200, I gave him the go ahead to develop the product. Two weeks and fourteen versions later, we are in the process of negotiating with manufacturers for mass production of the product. If we play our cards right, this product will become a new revenue center.
Most companies don't perform any R&D because they don't always have the staff, experience or the open-minded attitude required for successful innovation. But it is those very companies most capable of flexible, purposeful change that succeed.
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My organization is basically a custom software development center in Estonia. Our R&D department developed a fully-blown web framework and two productivity tools during the last five years. I'm not sure how much is it per cent, but we have four people working full-time and we have more than 200 workers. Some other people also do some R&D of on a smaller scope.
Sure, I think many peoples(boss and empolyee) all want innovation, coz the boss need more benifit and the employee wanna more income. But it's very diffcult to perform it and the reason coming from many ways, such as personal ability and cost.
I'm working as software product manager, I aslo know how much important of innovation, we need it and we are tring to get it though it looks far away from us.
vimalaadhithan M
Senior Manager - Business Excellence & Quality Management @ Philips Electronics India
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I am sharing my experience with Microsoft IT where i worked couple of years.
Microsoft IT does the following Innovation at India
- Dogfooding the product division.Testing all releases from product division before it gets into market.All the enterprise applications are built using these releases
- Business got formed around Center of Excellence around work areas like HR,Admin,Licensing,LCA etc
- Rotational program management program in place.This will create pool of program managers out of top talent out from college in a span of 2 years time period.
- TSP,PSP,Agile kind of process frameworks are experimented
- Six Sigma scorecards are established for COEs and CIO
- Separate Business Transformation Team is put up in place for continuous improvement in processes owned by Microsoft IT India
I would say a good 50% or better of our time is spent on research and development. In the IT world things tend to get stale quickly, there is always something faster and better coming down the track.
In order to keep current we are continually researching new Open Source products that we can develop into industry specific uses for potential clients.
Cynthia FS C
VP, Governance Director at the Center for the Advancement of Enterprise Architecture Profession
Not much, based on what I see and "feel".
And I agree, organizations do need to have the sense of innovation and talent development - but that takes investment.
Lawrence B
Owner and Principal Systems Engineer, Wolverine Technologies
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Easily 50% - could be more or less depending on the directive of the day. Compliance, security, deployment conformity, replication, worldwide servicability, mean-time-to-fix, and task suitability are critical. Fortunately, I live in a world where end-users are expected to acclimate themselves with new deployments (to a point).
That, of course, means it's got to be right the first time...
