With the margins of IT firms getting hit due to slowdown in the biggest IT market, there is sudden focus on innovation, cost-cutting, productivity and high-end services. Great!! At least the IT services companies are now thinking about innovation. But what they are thinking of is not as useful as they are thinking it would be.
By creating products and selling IPs (intellectual property), you can get limited amount of boost on margins. By promoting use of tools, there can only be a limited increase in productivity levels.
This is fine in the short term -- as a tactical measure. However, sustained growth can't be achieved through these measures. What you need to do is - "Bring innovation in the thought process of your organization". Enable your people to think of ways to do things differently -- create tools of their own. You will need to prod them and give some directions and let them complete the circuit of innovation. Yes, this is a slow process --- However, this is the only way we can sustain growth and also lead to proper utilization of the brains of several thousands of IT people.
When i say direction, i mean telling (showing) them how some easy tools were created and throwing questions at them on what could be the different possibilities arising from it. This is what i call " Weaving a framework for innovative thinking". So, don't tell them 'Use tools', enable them to create their own tools.
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4 comments:
You made a good point there. With these client companies going to host companies for distribution of their specific business function, the problem of dependency will arise. There will be no growth if we don't create our own way of doing things.
Oh and thank you for visiting my blog. Your comment was much appreciated.
Thanks Jess. I will keep sharing my views with you.
Manu, good thought.
Here are two cents from me as most of the time at SUN, all we do is to think, and think hard, on how to innovate and kick butts of our competitors.
Innovation comes with a huge price tag. Its like setting up a manufacturing industry where profits could never be expected to flow in on say .. 3 monts from now. To build a solid innovation base, organizations need to plan at the grass-root level i.e. HR practices in recruitment, employee benefits, flexi timings, availability of tools to play, opportunity and budget to visit/participate in though provoking seminars etc etc.
Big consulting companies like infy, wipro, tcs etc have did a tremendous job in selling services and have made themselves cash rich. They are aligning to thinking products rather than services by having CoE (Center of Excellence) practices, which is great. However, they can afford to go full throttle on this aspect, which still need to be witnessed.
Bharani, I differ somewhere between 90-180 degrees on this. I think it depends on how you interpret or define innovation -- my latest post talks about exactly this --> http://itcit.blogspot.com/2008/07/cheating-innovation.html
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