Mastering The Hype Cycle

A CIO at the recent Sydney Symposium described to me how he had set up a number of activities to drive innovation within his organization, from early stage “sandpits” for experimentation, through “hothouses” for nurturing promising ideas, to later stage “engine rooms” for rolling out new ideas in a disciplined way.

In addition to the expected benefits in terms of encouraging new technologies and approaches, he commented that he had also found an unanticipated upside in terms of increasing the level of trust that the business had for IT. He had created a joint sandpit environment with one particular area of the business, to examine relevant new technologies. After working together for a while, the business manager in question requested that a whole set of IT infrastructure that his unit ‘owned’ (because they wanted the flexibility to make their own decisions about acquisition and management) be rolled back into IT.

By demonstrating that IT could be imaginative and flexible at the leading edge of innovation, the entire IT department gained credibility in the eyes of the business.