It was interesting that the spring 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos closed with a session where world business leaders focused on true innovation to solve major problems: "The Creative Imperative". Others are echoing this general call for innovation. For example, it's both an internal and an external lead message at IBM and a hot topic in this month's Harvard Business Review. However, at about the same time, a Capgemini survey suggested European CIOs have been focused on external sourcing strategies to reduce costs, but the savings are not being reinvested into IT for business innovation. Our own surveys reveal budget growth trends that suggest a rather mediocre strategic investment attitude toward IT. We know it is not CIOs who usually lead big business changes enabled by IT, and recently I have met some CIOs who suggest IT is not a business strategic force, while others say their primary objective is simply to cut the cost of IT to the company.

So, what really big ideas is the IT industry offering business leaders these days — or are we running out of steam? They did ERP, CRM and e-business (thanks, IT — those were neat!). What comes next? A cursory glance at IT industry umbrella marketing suggests some fuzziness. "Business agility" is vague, and few companies get passionate about ideas like "on-demand business" or "the adaptive enterprise." Compliance is sometimes seen as FUD, and security is an operating cost. Web 2.0 looks like fun for Google and Silicon Valley startups — but not much else. Has the IT industry run out of really big business ideas? What should the industry be proposing?

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After reading several Gartner experts on the subject I'm amazed to find them still commenting on IT as a magician pulling rabbits out of hats as we did all along the 90's.
We are now service providers and poor ones at that for most companies. Yesterday's magicians are learning the hard facts about being a professional in the business harness pulling his weight towards the common goal of profit.
Yet there is an eldorado out there. The management of data/information/knowledge is not only in its infancy but offers true opportunities for productivity, growth and most important as a contribution to the growth of the business through Knowledge capitalization, Knowledge products, and the Management of RISKS associated to data.
The key to enable this Eldorado is the ability for IT to federate all actors of the firm around two concepts: Data at production has a Value Potential for the firm and therefore deserves attention from managers as to how it is being produced, Data at the minute it is produced creates a liability for the firm unless it is properly managed in it's life cycle.
ARISE SAS is creating a European (31 country) database to help the industry to KNOW what it is producing (Data Classification) and to EVALUATE the risks (retention, privacy, copyright, patents).

Colleagues and I have been asking this question for a few months now. We’ve been providing Knowledge Management support to government organizations in the form of a GOTS package know as Knowledge Now with surprising success. Surprising because the train was driven mostly by users and our lessons learned fly in the face of conventional perspectives. What we believe based on our experience is that CIO offices will need to learn to let go. The controls and constraints in place for most solution-sets are hindering agility. What users demand are fast, flexible, and responsive platforms that allow for integration with all aspects of a community. We’ve been kicking around two thoughts. First, the idea of a knowledge market that’s driven by the economics of information contained therein. A “community” type of collaborative platform that permits users to use as they see fit. Second is a focus on integration, not of systems, but of the entire package. Solutions will need to become more customized to the idiosyncrasies of the community. No fluff. No extra bells and whistles. Just the basic enablers tightly coupled with strategic focus, operational parameters, tactical behaviors, cultural dispositions, etc. For too long software solution vendors have been over promising and under delivering. IT is not a substitute for good old fashioned business administration.

What I could figure out from the dicussion above is all that is there with little incremental changes to makes things better by using "IT" But the real break through would be bring a new dimensional thought and bussines process that can do away with lot unnessary bussiness altogether....like what if "IT" can replace all the banks in the world. what if "IT" can replace all the car show rooms around the world.
All this is quit possible with current technology but the business players/investors want an incremental growth so that they don't lose there shirts .......other wise "IT" can really make it what ever

Great topic, and I think you're right. I sense we're at a point where there are many intelligent IT people in need of a "big idea" to give them direction, but that business really doesn't care that much. IT people use the words "creativity" and "innovation" all the time, but I often feel that these words are uttered so frequently precisely because IT leads to such little tangible business innovation these days - a development that must frustrate a lot of people.

What can IT do for business innovation? Continued automation is certainly one thing. But I do think that IT has become a sort of "innovation scapegoat", given the dearth of truly innovative ideas floating around the corporate world, which has reached a certain level of maturity. Real business innovation can use IT, but need not rely on it.

Have we reached an IT innovation threshold, at least for a time, such that further efforts actually produce diminishing returns? No - there is still work to be done. But nevertheless, maybe it's also time to focus on non-IT innovation, on "doing the right things right", taking advantage of all the partially implemented "Next Big Things" of the past decade, and making them work as intended. As one of the Gartner bloggers wrote, maybe the "Next Big Thing" is simply the proper orchestration of these things.

Likewise, have we reached a temporary human threshold for the capacity to use IT? Once a person can use IT anywhere/anytime, with more information immediately available than can ever be digested and processed, do further advances make that much of a difference? Has IT achieved its goal of mobility and information, and if so, does anything have to be next? Is there a "so what" moment, when IT has achieved enough for the individual, such that the marginal utility curve starts petering out?

So too with the idea of a "new management science", as mentioned in another blog entry. As Henry Mintzberg detailed in the early 1970s, those who run corporations prefer verbal exchanges, rely on relationships, have their own agendas, and will never make full use of "perfect world" IT data to make organizational decisions in a political environment.

At some point, it becomes a question of actually doing something with all the available information. And to this end, the use of IT for collaborative purposes remains a vital part of what is being developed today.

Unfortunately, much business innovation today, especially in certain industries, consists of constructing what Scott Adams has called a "confusology" - an intentionally complex approach designed to generate more revenue from end consumers.

What if the Next Big Thing in business, regardless of IT, is to take on things more meaningful to society than perpetuating the confusology, or creating a new brand of toothpaste? What if business started concentrating on problems that could cripple society: health care and pension issues, the needs of a changing population, the need for new infrastructure, the prison system, and all the rest of things that we now expect government to address, but much of which government did not address 75 years ago? What if the Next Big Thing were the privatization of many government functions, to fix our broken systems? Would this also supply greater meaning and a fresh challenge for IT, which is now "merely" preoccupied with increasing revenue and cutting costs for companies that produce an increasingly commoditized set of goods and services?