I’m sorry to say that too many CIOs still consider innovation some kind of stand-alone activity that happens in the dark recesses of an R&D laboratory — unrelated to their daily work. Others view innovation as a technology to be deployed. You can almost hear a CIO calling her local services firm and placing an order for innovation; as if it came shrink-wrapped and sitting on a shelf. Wrong again.

The new “everything-as-a-service” paradigm actually should allow CIOs to spend less time focused on the utility aspect of IT and more time leveraging technology to drive innovation.

In any case, innovation isn’t a magic bullet that will solve all of our business ills. Nor is it a product CIOs can purchase and implement. To my mind, enterprise IT innovation can be incremental. It can be about creatively leveraging the tools and processes you have at your disposal to drive business value in new ways.

Incremental Change

A number of years ago, my IT team at the U.S. Tennis Association worked with a partner to add bar code scanning to the tickets at our tournament. This ensured the authenticity of the ticket and helped to reduce scalping of fake tickets. However, it also created an opportunity for an unrelated — and unintended — innovation. Because we have to limit the number of people on our campus during our tournament to comply with public safety issues, ticket scanning allowed us to know in real time how many people were on campus at any given time. In turn, this knowledge created an opportunity to sell additional grounds passes to generate revenue — in the seven-figure range each year. Did we deploy a new technology? No. Instead, we leveraged an existing capability and found an innovative way to drive new revenue.

It also points out that while some innovations do need seed capital --requiring you to cut operating costs to shake free a few dollars-- in most cases, innovation requires less in financial capital and more in human thought equity. You don’t always need a dedicated team to drive innovation; instead, make it the responsibility of everyone who works with you. Turn your people loose and let them come up with creative ideas and solutions. That is the true essence of innovation.

Additionally, innovation requires a favorable corporate culture to be successful. How many of our organizations in the current economic climate are open to trying things that may fail? Yet, in order to create a culture of innovation, you must be open to the reality that a certain percentage of trials or ideas won’t work out as hoped. Is your organization willing to stub its toe or will it penalize people who take educated risks that don’t pan out? How can you help change that culture to motivate innovation?

Successful Failure

A few years back we implemented a set of collaboration tools to support an important volunteer initiative. The technology we implemented, while best-in-class then, wound up not being ready for prime time. However, the experience we gained from this effort, and the new way of working with our clients, allowed us to successfully deploy a SharePoint portal two years later with great success. The initial project was flawed, but it paved the way for future success. How would you and your management perceive that type of effort?

Sometimes innovation is messy. It’s imperative that you view “successful failure” as a welcome option and leverage the lessons learned through this process. Always keep the long-range objective in mind and use your experiences as opportunities to “move the chains” in your drive toward innovation. Taking these steps will help you gain support and buy-in for more business-driven IT innovation to happen.

Larry Bonfante is the CIO of the USTA and the founder of CIO Bench Coach LLC, an executive coaching practice. He publishes a monthly newsletter which can be found here for his latest insights.

Larry also is a member of Smart Enterprise Exchange and can be reached on the site.

The words loomed large on the screen in the presentation theatre. “Is the role of the CIO dead?” It’s one of those awkward questions that always splits opinion, provokes debate, and―if you happen to be a CIO―makes you put down your BlackBerry and listen. After all, the Cloud is either the last nail in the coffin for the CIO as we know it – or it is a great opportunity to transform the way services and value are provided to the business. Others see a renaissance of sorts for the role of the CIO as industry comes out of the recession and CIOs are needed to help drive new growth for their respective organisations.

And then it happened. While sitting among the 25 or so C-level executives from public and private U.K. companies in the presentation, Bannister had a brainwave. Of course, the CIO isn’t finished as an entity, I thought. He or she just needs to adapt: to be an innovator; stimulating new ideas that keep the business one step ahead. Let’s face it, until now, the CIO has been very much focused on the supply of IT, steadily being pushed by the business to develop enterprise resource planning systems, complex algorithmic databases, or other highly technical solutions. Solutions that were all too often years in the making.

However, this is getting a lot, lot harder because of the Cloud. The business wants services now, they want them cheaply―and if the CIO can’t deliver, they’ll call the nearest managed service provider and order an on demand Cloud service on their credit card. This widely-discussed ‘consumerisation of IT’ means the CIO needs to switch away from supplying IT solutions. Instead, they need to create demand: innovating new services the business needs. Where the CIO used to be pulled by the business, now he or she will be pushed by it.

Take RFID, for example. A few years ago it was the poster child of IT; it briefly shone brightly but was hampered by cost, complexity, and drawn out implementation cycles. Now it’s back on the radar; the technology has evolved, the price point has come down, and firms are hungry to snap it up to streamline their supply chain. It’s the same with related retailing innovations self-service kiosks, intelligent shelf-edge labels, or a host of other emerging ideas. The CIO needs to be the powerhouse for these ideas, continually pumping them out through the business.

To some extent, the CIO role will merge with that of the COO. Both will become responsible for IT and business processes; both will innovate. The difference right now is that one reports to the board, while the other typically reports to finance. Only when the CIO begins reporting to the board, will he or she be perceived as an enabler. Not an overhead.

On a recent trip to London, I looked out on the Thames and walked the expansive halls of the Tate Modern museum. As I considered cubism’s impact on the 20th-Century, I was struck by the following passage accompanying a painting by Gino Severini: “Is there any word quite so passé-sounding as ‘futurism?’ ” a commentary asked.

The Italian artist Severini belonged to a group known as ‘futurists.’ But the writer—essayist and novelist Gilbert Adair-- claimed that the problem with this school of art was its lack of foresight. Even as they attempted to “communicate their love of speed and movement…they were ill-equipped to keep up with a world whose technology was evolving infinitely more rapidly” than they were, Adair wrote.

Hmmm. Sounds familiar, I thought. Is this an age-old dilemma that innovators and technologists face in every generation? Isn’t software plagued by new versions and patches coming out before current versions are even in use? And what about consumer technologies and mobile devices with shelf lives a fraction of what they once were? Isn’t this the reason legacy systems will always exist? Is planned obsolescence really a part of some business product strategies?

Adair likened the futurist’s plight to that of the man who spent years inventing the automobile only to be run down by one as he rushed to announce his discovery. Ultimately, he says, instead of impressing us with its advances and novelty, the painting—like many attempts at innovation—is really more of “a document of its own period…an example not of futurism, but of what might be called ‘futurewasm.’”

Not a very upbeat assessment, but it does point out the limitations of innovation—or at least of 20th-century art!

Does the pace of change hinder innovation? Let me know your thoughts…

(And to view the painting, Suburban Train Arriving in Paris, 1915, click here)

The CA Championship is underway, with 9 of the Top 10 golfers in the world taking their best shots at the vaunted Blue Monster at Doral.  As a lifelong golf aficionado, and one of those rare birds who finds equal satisfaction in watching, playing and analyzing golf statistics  – I read with keen interest Friday’s Wall Street Journal article titled “A Stat is Born:  Golf’s New Putting Measure”, which formally introduces the PGA Tour’s newest Metric of Success:   “putts gained per round”.

While this new metric could probably use a punchier name, the rationale for its creation lies in an age old question, previously unanswered despite golf being almost as old as the dirt on which its played, and despite the massive dataset which the PGA Tour has compiled over the past 30 years.  

The question:   Who is the Best Putter?

This is not an insignificant question, in a game which readily comes down to the old mantra:   Drive for Show, Putt for Dough.   Whether you are a scratch golfer or a Sunday hack, you are likely familiar with the knee-buckling, palm-sweating and heart palpitating symptoms of golfing’s “last mile”   Yet traditional measures have proved inadequate – despite their longstanding acceptance.

Putting Average – the current standard, computes only putts taken on greens reached in regulation.  This approach excludes the 30% of putts which are made on greens not reached in regulation.   Other accepted metrics have similar biases and variability which again makes them only marginally able to quantify a true measure of putting success.

“Statistics can just become a big splash of numbers and not mean anything.   But this, we think, will mean something,” said Steve Evans, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president for information systems.   “It’s complex to calculate, but simple to understand”.

Pretty well sums it up….simplicity and innovation in the face of complexity.  Of course, since this quote came from an IT guy, it got me thinking about how IT executives are (or aren’t) aggressively pursuing innovative new Metrics to keep pace with the massive datasets they’ve accumulated over the years, and to support the innovative technologies and delivery systems which they have created.   

A recent CIO briefing I attended touched on this –with the CIO himself challenging the long-standing financial baselines used by IT executives to measure earned value contribution.   I found this refreshing and yet as the conversation evolved, the real challenge was in establishing some consistent, standard and consensus measures of earned value.  

Put simpler – a normalized and standardized way of looking at IT Service Cost Models.   This becomes an essential metric:  “How much does X service cost” and “How much does that X service cost compared with Y competitor or Z industry or W service provider or cloud host”?.

Until an apples-to-apples service cost benchmark can be established, individual organizations will be at the mercy of service providers and cloud hosts who purport to be able to do it “better, faster and (most importantly) cheaper”.    While these delivery models certainly have the implicit advantage of economies-of-scale, they are able to do this by standardizing the services they provide (the “good enough” concept).   They have stripped out the variability and pet projects and customization inherent in so many organizations, and their cost-of-service baselines.   

But how then to determine which Service Provider to select?   Are they all using a similar standard set of Cost variables?   Are they all delivering the same quality of services?   Are they all delivering the same security or portability?

Similarly, while much of the discussion on Cloud Computing seems to cite the primary barrier of “security” and “quality” – in my opinion having a Cloud Cost Benchmark for a set of standard services will soon become the real barrier to comparing, selecting and switching service providers.   

And finally, as IT executives continue to innovate their own services, having a new set of metrics will be needed to fully communicate the value they are bringing.    Without these, they risk marginalizing their gains because of antiquated measures.

For what it’s worth, using the PGA Tour’s new putting metric, Luke Donald would be considered golf’s Best Putter.   I’ve got my money on another Brit to tame the Blue Monster this weekend:   Paul Casey.

What are some innovative metrics your organization is using?