Game Changers - A Day of Innovation Keynote Summary

Sukhi Gill, CTO EMEA & HP Fellow

The idea is to gauge innovation value by how excited the business units outside of IT get with the concepts. Conversations are sparked by discussing major disrupters and how to get budget to keep the lights on and innovate.

Case in point, the new Galaxy phone is equivalent computing power to a rack of servers and storage from 2000. How do we get the business to take the "cool" things like incredible hand-held power, pervasive network access, and social media and get them to fund IT to enable those things they want to use to be usable.

Adopting new technologies without a business model to support them is setting yourself up for failure. In most organizations, IT innovation lags behind business, and we're constantly playing a game of catch-up.

So what are the top three disruptors?
Consumerisation of IT, or BYOD as it's more familiarly known in our industry. Start with allowing email access through consumerised devices, then address the mobility challenges of which apps should be allowed, and which should not. Virtualisation and mobile delivery of the core user functions of business applications is where we should focus our attention.

Cloud is continuing to pervade, and the convergence of clouds will make public cloud offerings more appealing. The IT department will have to change, as they are more so brokers of movement to cloud services, and must manage the IT supply chain with extreme diligence.

Big Data and real-time analytics. 85% of organisational data is not formatted in a way that meta-data is available to readily locate and understand the context of the data. We are increasingly forced to understand unstructured data by legislation, and the pure quantity. Sukhi provided the idea of placing sensors in our luggage to track where it is via our mobile devices, where most of the actual information is available, and the technology is all about, but the data isn't used,mor even understood where to be found. This example is how a consumer demand drives business technology change.

If we as IT leaders lead budget conversations with infrastructure upgrades and software revisions, we won't make our case. If we talk about real business problems, and how we can address them with game changing technologies, we are more likely to get the funding needed to balance operations and innovation. Identify the biggest business problems, break down the complexity of the problems, and look for options to solve those components. We must be bold in addressing the disruptive technologies with the business.

Consider writing a business briefing document that poses "what if our competitors did this before us?"

Have an annual budget planning meeting with the business units where you share a roadmap with the business units on how your business could be disrupted, and spark a conversation you've prepared for on how to adapt proactively. Scenario planning is vital, as is holding workshops using demonstrations. As an example, corning.com and hp.com have public domain videos of what the future technologies they are developing are like.
Combine innovation in infrastructure refresh projects.








- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad