As we’ve been covering potentially ground-breaking technology for the last few posts (here, here, here, here, and here) I’m wondering how you, gentle reader, and your organization, deal with novelty, innovation, and change?
Novelty, the emergence of a New Hotness that has no immediately understandable value, is a big problem in large organizations. The cause of this problem is those members of the enterprise who are excited about whatever the New Hotness is are usually upsetting the status quo for the groups that have to support and manage whatever it is impacts. This is understandable as the support and management people have a job to do and what appears in the novelty stage to be arbitrary forays into new technologies and processes have real overheads … they distract from the job at hand.
But in many cases, novelty turns out to ultimately have an upside; work gets done faster, easier, better, and or cheaper. At that point, novelty becomes recognized as unavoidable and morphs into innovation. The problem for enterprises is in recognizing the innovation potential of novelty and not just allowing for its more or less guaranteed appearance but actually embracing novelty before the demand for adapting becomes desperate.
For example, in many enterprises, smartphones (particularly the iPhone), were once a novelty and what did the IT group do? They pretty much ignored smartphones because they weren’t part of How We Do Things.
That situation continued until it became obvious that smartphones were not only not going away but that they had become extensions of the wired network, that their use was endemic in the enterprise, and they also raised really serious implications for corporate security. At that point, most IT groups were late to the game and a greater or lesser degree of urgent running around looking for integration and management solutions ensued. How to integrate these consumer-oriented devices into the overall network? How to secure them? What are the best operational policies for these devices? It’s a long and complex list of decisions that no one wants to rush into.
This same scenario has been repeated for all sorts of novelties over the last couple of decades including modems, printers, messaging clients, wireless access points, Web browsers, USB drives, online services, iPads … it’s a long list and one that will continue to be added to, most likely at an ever increasing rate.
What I think is missing in many enterprises is a rational approach to unavoidable novelty. If you aren’t going out and finding what the New Hotness is, it’s guaranteed the New Hotness will come and find you … and when it does, you could well be in for a tough time should you have to scramble to embrace the changes demanded of you.
Actually my recent posts on Rossi’s E-Cat are a great example of why enterprises need to stay on top of novelty. I’m sure that there are many of you reading this posting who think the whole E-Cat thing is a scam of some kind, that it just can’t be real but consider: What if it is real? What do you really know about Rossi’s technology, the business possibilities it might offer, and how unlimited, incredibly cheap energy could transform your business? If you were to reject the possibilities out of hand, what could be the consequences when you find your competitors are already moving on the opportunity?
So, how do you corporately go about embracing novelty, innovation, and change? I think a great way is to assign people to become Corporate Geeks.
Empower a a number of articulate, geeky employees, ideally from multiple departments not just IT, to proactively go looking for what’s new. Set goals for their explorations and experiments, get them hooked into the social fabric of the enterprise so that when anyone finds something cool and useful they immediately think to discuss it with the Corporate Geeks. Get the Corporate Geeks to publish a New Hotness newsletter to the staff, get the staff involved in testing the New Hotness and giving feedback. Make the search for and embracing of novelty part of your cultural DNA.
The agile, adaptable enterprise of the future won’t just be ready of change but, to paraphrase Star Trek, it will be equipped to explore strange new products, to seek out new business models and new processes, to boldly go where no other corporation has gone before.
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