Innovation Gardening

Innovation activities are no different from business as usual ones and need constant cultivating to ensure that they do not overgrow to an extent where they hamper the Enterprise.

The New Year is a great time to review your previous years activities and future pipelines to ensure that you stop, decommission or strategically review/align them before they are promoted into live. Innovation as a business activity is extremely beneficial to an organisation; be it to create customer value, grow market share or increase profitability (both from customer sales and cost reduction programs internally) however with the rise of ‘digital” it is very easy for different Business Units to spin up POCs that test concepts without decommissioning or involving IT.

Without constant review these proof of concepts can actually cause future issues where they become live without passing any service introduction process and suddenly become an unofficially supported problem heritage application that has another back end data store that requires archiving.

When reviewing your Innovation Pipeline the following will ensure that you remain on track to deliver.

• Are all items still appropriate to allow you to deliver on your Innovation mandate?
• Do all items still align with the current Business strategy and architectural roadmap?
• Have all items still got a sponsor?
• Does the Business Case still offer value?

If any of the above are no longer true it is certainly time to remove the item or if it has progressed into the Proof of Concepts stage to decommission (ensuring that any lessons learned are noted for future reference).

It is extremely important to perform the “why” test on all Innovation activities to ensure that they offer value and more importantly are culturally acceptable. No ideas are bad ideas; they are either implemented incorrectly or are being promoted at the wrong time where they are not culturally or technically acceptable.