Global firm Kurt Salmon, specialists in strategic advisory in their latest report warns this week that out-dated IT structures within organisations in the UK are preventing innovation.
Practice leader Darryl Salmons urged Chief Information Officers (CIOs) more space needs to be freed up for innovation and new ideas. To do this, UK businesses need to simplify and standardise their IT systems. Without the right IT governance in place, employees struggle to implement any innovative ideas.
Innovation may feature highly on the CIO agenda, but according to Kurt Salmon ‘…the execution often falls short of the ambition. Reasons for this range from the mundane, such as there being insufficient time or capacity to devote to it, to the more fundamental, such as organisational or cultural barriers, or insufficiently defined processes and governance for capturing ideas and seeing them through to fruition.’
This indicates that the real challenge for businesses is to build innovation into their organisations whilst taking care of their daily workloads. Innovation maybe high on the CIO’s agenda, but other issues may take priority such as budget costs, productivity and security leading Kurt Salmon to conlucde that ‘innovation through IT remains more of an aspiration than a habit’.
From this perspective, Salmons advised businesses focus on the following four key principles to help prioritise their projects: simplification; standardisation; modularisation; interoperability.
