Seven Impediments to IT Innovation and How CTOs Can Overcome Them

Success in today’s competitive and fast-paced business environment depends on innovation. But the intent to innovate is not enough. Successful innovation depends on understanding impediments to innovation and overcoming such challenges. Here are seven impediments to IT innovation.

1. Not getting the approach right

Many enterprises get the approach to innovation wrong.

At least some CTOs confuse innovation with troubleshooting. Innovation may fix problems, but the core purpose of innovation is not troubleshooting. Real innovation is about reimagining processes from the ground up. At the same time, it does not mean discarding the old and starting afresh. Innovation achieves something new or makes a fresh approach to the existing business assets. It co-opts new assets only if necessary.

Also, most enterprises approach innovation casually. They do not have formal innovation-management structures. While innovation does not need a rigid structure, it succeeds only articulated as a company-wide commitment.

CTOs who drive successful innovation:

Think up ideas for transformational change upfront and strategize execution.
Talk to customers, and evaluate if the innovation will add value to them.
Collaborate with other business leaders and managers to execute the strategy.
Set up management structures that support innovation. Architecture review committees determine the technologies needed for the new project. Business incubators help teams build business cases and draw up resources for the project.

2. Limited funding and resources

Innovation needs funding. The C-suite is often reluctant to fund projects that have no quantifiable returns. Most funding for innovation does not go beyond the prototype phase, where it cannot pass financial muster. CTO’s need to:

Divide the IT budget for operational and innovation, and allocate a decent part for innovation. Enterprises spent only about 19% of their IT budget on building innovative capabilities.
Get top management and C-suite support before starting innovation projects. Champion the cause of project funding with the C-suite, convincing them of the benefits on offer.
Many innovation projects impact profits initially. Convince the top management of the future cost savings. Articulate indirect gains. Innovation may deliver cost offsets that make products cheaper and more competitive. It may enable business process optimization, speed up time-to-market delivery and improve customer satisfaction. The monetary gains of such benefits are realized only in the long run.

3. Inadequate Infrastructure

Many enterprises do not have the infrastructure in place to innovate. They remain saddled with difficult-to-replace legacy tech that cannot accommodate the innovation demands. Manual or non-digital databases, which develop organically, remain the biggest stumbling block. Such silos inhibit data analytics and distort insights.

CTOs committed to driving innovation:

Tackle data silos as preparatory work before starting the innovation project.
Invest in automating routine and mundane work. This removes silos, improves accuracy, and frees up staff for higher-level tasks. Automation delivers good returns through process efficiency, even without innovation.
Ensure consistent and scalable communication at every level of the enterprise.
Invest in upskilling and training. Often, failure to keep up with the rapid pace of technology becomes a barrier to innovation. When employees are unfamiliar or incompetent at using new technologies, they cannot embrace innovation, even if they want to.

4. Lack of time

Today’s employees work under intense time pressure. Dice’s 2021 Technologist Sentiment Report reports one in three technologists as burned out. They have very little time or energy to think or focus beyond their routine, day-to-day responsibilities. When all employees have specific responsibilities, innovation takes a backseat.

CTOs seeking to roll out innovation projects:

Pay attention to time management. CTOs and other tech leaders always have multiple, urgent tasks that drain their energy. Allocate time wisely. Balance value-adding and growth-oriented projects, and routine tasks. Empower and delegate subordinates to handle firefighting.
Separate the innovation project from the business unit. The innovation team focuses on winning against the competition, and increasing market share. The routine operations team focuses on keeping operations running.
Reshape departments to run like startups. Provide functional autonomy to departments, which encourages innovation.

Find out how enterprise IT can make the perfect trade-off between operations and innovation.

5. No Follow-through

Coming up with innovative ideas is the easy part. The hard part is the follow-up or taking the idea to its logical end.

Many CTOs do not focus on innovation. Many innovation efforts often end up scattershot. Implementation of innovation-focused projects in isolation does not create synergies. The energy gets frizzled out before it gains traction.

Smart CTOs:

Have champions to promote innovation. If feasible, hire project-specific CIOs.
Make sure employees can adopt the new implementations. Even when there is not much resistance to change, employees may struggle to integrate the changes into their work routine. The changes soon fall by the wayside and work reverts to the old, usual way.
Avoid scattershot innovation implementation. Applying innovation in localised settings fails to create synergies needed to deliver benefits.

6. Ignoring the Cultural Challenges

Many CTOs and business leaders underestimate the impact of culture. Culture can make or break an enterprise. It can either propel innovation or sound its death-knell. Innovation will not happen in a culture of conformity that discourages questions. Rather, innovation thrives in an open culture that encourages diverse voices.

Top management and CTOs encourage the workforce to innovate by:

Promoting open information flow, making hierarchies irrelevant, and establishing trust. An atmosphere of politics and bureaucracy stifles innovation.
Walking the talk, with a mindset of openness. Employees do not innovate when doing things outside the norm seems out of place.
Encouraging risk-taking. Innovation does not thrive in a culture that punishes employees when things go wrong.
Supporting new initiatives to counter resistance to change. When innovation feels out of place or seems too difficult, people will not accept it. Many employees, entrenched in their comfort zones, will accept nothing new.

7. Not Becoming Agile

Innovation involves doing something different from the norm. This is easy for start-ups who seek to enter the market through differentiation. Established companies with a solid customer base and brand equity are reluctant to change something which works well. They remain apprehensive about how customers would react to the changes. They often make reactive changes after the external environment makes existing set-ups untenable. CTOs do themselves a favor by:

Making their enterprises agile and ready to change at short notice.
Overhauling their enterprise systems to support flexible working practises.
Being proactive and always on the alert to tackle unforeseen obstacles that come up to derail even the best-laid plans.

In today’s age of fast-paced changes, most enterprises are only one big significant change in technology away from obsolescence. The ability to innovate makes the business future-proof. Successful enterprises understand the barriers to innovation and overcome them.

Andre Rodrigues

As a software and IT solutions advisor, Andre leads a team of technology consultants for implementing Account-based Marketing strategies to IT customers. In his 30 years of working experience, across the region, Andre has helped numerous clients improve existing business systems and IT infrastructure. This experience has helped Andre secure a unique knowledge and understanding of the challenges faced by these sectors.