Innovating at no costs

This post is dedicated to those, who still think that innovation is a costly affair:

“I agree with you” -- is what I could say and that would sum it up. But most of my friends know that I don’t really agree to it.

As I have pointed out in my this post (http://itcit.blogspot.com/2008/07/cheating-innovation.html) , there are two types of innovators. Since we know that type 1 innovation is costlier than type 2 innovation, most businesses should actually go for first kind of innovation (‘Creation’) only when the second type (‘Application’) is not available. And yes it is quite possible that all your efforts and money spent on type 1 innovation goes in vain due to changes in market condition or due to someone else creating and launching a similar or better product before you do. However, type 1 innovation can give you massive returns (if type 2 innovation is also applied effectively on the product obtained from type 1 innovation) much more than what type 2 can give you.

In that sense, I would say Innovation (type 1) is like the stock market --- high risk, high return. If you are not looking for high returns, you can still get decent returns (in fact, better returns in turbulent times) from bonds/ deposits i.e. type 2 innovation.

Non-fluid employees of large corporations

Large corporations, be it IT or non-IT (I will talk more in terms of IT firms), have the tendency of making people stick or non-fluid i.e. the same group of employees (the entire hierarchy) carrying on from one project to another. Though restructuring and location-transfers help to certain extent, but the time period during which this stickiness develops is shortening. Yes, this helps the organization in a way (better bonding between team members since they have been working together for long), but it also creates a problem. With such clusters getting formed, you would either have to go for the complete cluster or nothing. Hence, the skill availability gets severely hit and, while the employee utilization levels remain low, there is always demand for people -- a fake demand due to artificially choked supplies.

Final word
I think though such stick clusters are good, however, these clusters should be broken at regular intervals in order to ensure better access to talent across the organization. One important break-point should be the allowed time-frame for the cluster to remain a cluster once it is on 'bench'.

Even big R&D firms choke innovation

Once a great business leader (who heads a multi-billion dollar company) was stuck with a business problem for which neither he nor his wise men could come up with a real good solution. He went on and poised the question (in a simplified form) to a group of young children at a school. Children exclaimed at the simplicity of the question. And soon Jack had the solution (rather multiple solutions) before him.
Moral of the story:
1) Think different. Don’t choke innovation. Float your problems (wherever possible) to larger group of brains – instead of limiting it to your (labelled) wise men

2) Collaborate and reach out: someone from outside your team/group might turn a seemingly difficult problem into a real easy one.

3) Appreciate the fact that different people see things differently and different thought processes could actually bring out totally different views

Cheating = Innovation

Consider this:
Innovator 1: The person who conceives the idea e.g. the person who thought of and created the first internet networking website but made almost no money from it*
Innovator 2: The person who copied this idea and raked in millions through it.

We are labeling a copy-cat as innovator...Foolish - Isn’t it? But that is true, innovation has many dimensions (broadly 2 dimensions) – Innovator 1 was great on the ‘Creation’ aspect while Innovator 2 was great on the ‘Application’ aspect.

Can we say Innovator 1 > Innovator 2 or the other way round?
Well, it really depends on what objective these innovators had in mind and were they able to achieve those objectives. However, for most businesses, Innovator 2 would be better than Innovator 1 because the inherent objective of most businesses is to make money.

So, innovation (of type 2) might not actually be a big ticket item as most people think it to be.

* This is just an example and doesn’t refer to any person in the real world

Don't ask your IT guys to use innovations

One of my favorite books 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' by R. Bach, talks about boundaries being in the minds of people. These boundaries create the impression of unachievable or impossible. And Bach is able to convey the message very clearly and in the most succinct way. The question is "Who creates these boundaries?” We collectively do it as a society. First we create these boundaries and later, once these boundaries have become rigid, we talk about removing them and innovating. We tell people that 'today business can thrive only on innovation' etc. We create new models for executing our jobs. We provide them some tools for doing their jobs more efficiently.

Still doesn't work. Does it?So, what do we do then? Well, instead of giving fodder to the horse, tell it the path to find fodder.

Enable your guys (again, I am referring to employees of an IT services firm) to be innovators and not just users of innovations. That is what you need -- A big team of innovators.

And how do we prepare this team?

This can only be achieved if you orient the thought process of your guys in the right way. Just lead them to the point from where they have multiple options to proceed ahead -- instead of leading them straight to the solution. Then tell them how the final solution was reached. Ask them what could be the other possibilities and in what scenarios would such possibilities form a better choice. So, instead of telling them how the internally-developed (by some geek at your firm) productivity enhancement framework/tool works to generate code (or whatever) for a particular tier, tell them how it could have been done differently to achieve a different end. This is actually what we call as stimulus for 'Lateral thinking'. And this is what today's IT services firms need.

IT services firms dont need innovations ...

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.

Skill-based application frameworks

With the skilled programmers becoming a rare commodity and uncontrolled growth of IT industry, there is a need to think differently. We now need to move from requirements based frameworks to skill-based frameworks. By skill-based frameworks I mean, designing the applications/frameworks in such a way that people with low skill levels are also able to develop the required applications. Yes, we have already been supporting programming languages like Java, various modern-day application servers, IDEs etc for the same reason. However, as the need for skilled people increases and we find there are lesser numbers available, we will have to keep moving to more encapsulation i.e. skill based frameworks.

So, in effect, what we are looking at is an additional parameter (skill level of people) for deciding the architecture and framework of an application, besides the usual thing (customer requirements). This is something that we might see in future.

However, the best way of achieving this would be to create 2 frameworks:
1) A customer-requirements-based framework
2) A developer-skill-based framework

So, the development happens using the developer-skill-based framework and you create a tool to directly convert the skill-based framework to the requirement based framework.

This is what I think is the future and the most realistic solution to the skill-shortage problem.
I will further elaborate on this in my future posts.

Any opinions on this are most welcome.

Invisible design patterns

And you thought that the design patterns were a recent thing?

Of course not. If I reflect back on my yester years, I find that these design patterns are actually the solutions to the problems that I myself developed. And few years later I was being told to read and learn about design patterns. Once I read through, I realized that what I thought of as a new thing or a fantastic concept was actually something that I knew about since ages. Some clever guy had named them as design patterns and asked the world to use them. Anyways, that person has done a lot good by bringing this to the notice of everyone. I wonder, why I did not think of putting some fancy names to my design solutions and call them design patterns.

So, these were the visibly invisible, design patterns for me. However, if I look at them today, especially in J2EE context, I think they are fast becoming obsolete. Just looking to see who will be the next one to earn fame from naming some new design patterns.

Let me introduce this blog and me

Friends,
I am MGoel, an IT pro who is fast approaching 10 years of age in Information technology industry. An engineering grad from India's premier institution (IIT) , I have worked across the globe on various IT assignments of various size and nature. I will not take this intro further since i see the risk of being interpreted as a self-seller.
So this idea of starting my blog came to my yesterday. And this is my first blog --- and even the first experience in the blogging world. So, i will discuss almost everything about IT on this blog.

Anything else that i need to write about on this intro???

So, welcome to my blog.

As i signoff, i am just thinking what my first post would be --- and i have decided that i will not think about the topics but will write about whatever comes to my head. And if you, my friends, want to discuss about something -- i will write about that.

That's how you will see IT thru the eyes of a globetrotting IT pro.

Thanks
MG