Marcus CollinsBold breakthroughs or incremental innovation – which model should enterprises follow when implementing data management initiatives?
It seems that most of the reports I write have a recommendation along the lines of …
“As with all new technology, adoption initiatives start small. Focus on business units where the adoption of “the new technology/process” will yield measurable business value. As the initiative progresses and the business benefits can be shown to have been realized, use the initiative as a poster child to articulate the value of the new technology/process” to the rest of the enterprise.”
I’ve always wondered if this is the right approach or if a big-bang would be more effective.
I got an interesting perspective from an article in the Harvard Business Review – Block-by-Blockbuster Innovation. The article explains that many CEO’s want breakthroughs not incremental innovation (I’ll explain the differing innovation models in a later post). The author recommends thinking of innovation as a pyramid. The base of the pyramid covers the small but numerous ideas; middle covers new-opportunity areas; the top includes the small number of big-bets about the future direction of the enterprise.
The lesson I take from this – don’t underestimate the importance of small-scale change.
Many of the innovations I write about – database archiving; cloud databases; real-time analytics etc. – have the potential to yield major business value when deployed across the enterprise. But this benefit is not without cost – technical and business risk. To mitigate these risks enterprises should consider treating all innovation as if they were incremental. Start with a small scale pilot, measure the success or failure and then leverage the successes (and lessons learned) as the initiative is rolled-out to a larger audience.
So don’t be surprised if I continue to use the start small recommendation in future papers. Enterprises need a mix of big-bets and incremental innovation and both should follow a similar model if they are to deliver real business value.
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