If CIOs want innovation, they must create time and space for experimentation while making sure the day-to-day tasks are taken care of.
Innovation, after all, does not thrive in monotonous environments.
“I always talk about spending 10% of our time, and really setting that time aside, to look up and out into what's really going on in the industry,” Stephen Franchetti, CIO at Samsara, said. “Regardless of what role you're in, if you're a Salesforce admin, an integration engineer or if you're a director for corporate or financial systems, it's your responsibility to really understand what ‘good’ looks like within your world.”
Experimentation doesn’t always look like white lab coats and test tubes in a lab. For CIOs, it can mean getting your hands dirty by going out and connecting with end users to better understand areas of improvement or experimenting with new technology and tools.
When it comes to emerging technologies, such as generative AI tools, Justin Skinner, CIO at SmileDirectClub, suggests tech leaders sign up for free trials or betas.
“Write and play around with it,” Skinner said. “Try to find a use case in your current working day.”
Rewarding experimentation and innovation is key to fostering an environment and culture conducive to better problem-solving, according to Skinner.
Nearly 2 in 5 senior IT leaders say cultural misalignments or disconnects between IT operations and development teams play a role in blocking innovation, according to a Foundry survey of 400 senior IT decision-makers commissioned by Insight Enterprises.
To get good acceleration and ownership from team members, CIOs must celebrate people coming up with their own ideas on how to tackle a problem, Skinner said.
“As the team’s leader, [you need to be] involved enough to know what’s really going on,” Skinner said.
Technology leaders have to contend with the value experimentation can bring and the potential risks it can present. If CIOs fail to experiment, they may find digital transformation stunted and goals unfulfilled. But failing to acknowledge and adjust to business risks can lead to a CIO’s allocated budget withering away.
It’s a delicate balance CIOs know all too well.
Whether the IT team is embarking on a new project or optimizing existing systems, CIOs need to stay focused on where there is potential to bring value to the business.
“You need to really fall in love with that problem, and not just the technology,” Murat Genc, global data, technology and transformation officer at Whirlpool, said during a CIO Dive webinar in March. “You need to make sure you're building the right thing, not just building it in the right way.”
While it’s critical for teams not to get distracted by the newest technology for the sake of adoption, it’s also important to give IT employees the opportunity to experiment.
“Typically IT employees get focused on the problem du jour or the project that takes up most of their time, and that's probably appropriate,” Franchetti said. “But bringing that external knowledge, that kind of outside view in your interaction with the business starts to really up the conversation and the value that you can add to the organization, and ultimately gets us to a better solution.”
