Wadeson believes one of the reasons that a culture of innovation in IT has grown strong in Centrelink is because of the "long-standing tradition where people can quickly step across the [business/IT] divide. Businesspeople are literate in IT and a lot of IT people have worked in the business. Our new CEO, for example, has spent the first two days of this week being trained on the front office system, and is spending the last three days in an office in South Australia. He rings me every day and says: 'Do you know that your systems do this?'"

The CEO is not whingeing about performance, Wadeson says. Rather, he is identifying opportunities for IT.

It is this ability to identify opportunities that poses a challenge for most CIOs, according to Gartner's Blosch. "If you look at skills sets then IT traditionally has a pragmatic approach, it is more execution focused," he says, "where with innovation you want people who will go to the edge. There are three types of people - operators, guardians and entrepreneurs - and you typically don't get many entrepreneurs in IT."

Strategic Experiments

Yet for CIOs who did want to make a difference and advance their careers, innovation is important, says Blosch. "You don't win points for keeping the systems running - that's taken as read," he says, adding that this is increasingly seen as the job for a CTO rather than a CIO.

He advocates that CIOs start to take funds out of infrastructure projects in order to start developing systems that make strategic use of information and offer competitive leverage. "Real innovation is in making the contribution to the business and putting the information back into [the] CIO title - for many it's been about being a chief IT officer," he says.

Blosch says that from the handful of CIOs he found who were delivering innovative business solutions it was emerging that best innovation practice involved conducting strategic experiments. "Obviously there are dumb ideas, and you don't go there. There are dead certs, so yes you always do that, but then there are the maybes," he says. It is those maybes that may deliver competitive edge to the business and really make a contribution to the bottom line.

To work out if and how to proceed, Blosch says smart CIOs are conducting strategic experiments by working with a business sponsor, then running the experiment like a venture capital company and tightly time-boxing the experiment. At each deadline the project is reviewed, and if it is promising, a little more venture funding is provided. Akin to rapid prototyping, Blosch says this approach allows companies to identify innovation opportunities in a relatively non-threatening way.

This he says is particularly the case given the rising tide of regulation. Although regulation such as CLERP 9 and Sarbanes-Oxley might seem to give more power to the IT guardians rather than the IT entrepreneurs, Blosch says it is still possible to innovate using the strategic experiment route by ring-fencing regulated systems until any innovations were proven. And if the small experiments do not lead to full-blown deployments, "they are not a failure as long as you learn", he adds.

However, even finding a budget for small innovation experiments can be tough, he acknowledges, with Europe and Australia probably more constrained than the more innovation-hungry US and Asia. "But you have to speculate to accumulate. Rather than a $1 million project, look at running 10 $100,000 strategic experiments and if one of those succeeds the benefits could be significant."

Getting the money is only part of the problem; getting the mind-set to innovate may be tougher. "Are CIOs good at this? The answer is no," Blosch laments.

Some though are starting to work their way through the issues. Blosch says he is working with El Corte Ingles, Spain's third largest company, which has a reputation for innovation and which is now attempting to develop an innovation index for its various divisions to track innovation and its contribution to the bottom line in order to identify best practice that can then be copied into other areas of the business.

For Lee Barnett, CIO at AMP, the power of show and tell was made clear when the company held its first in-house IT Innovation and Thought Leadership Expo in 2005. Internal IT teams demonstrated to their peers and the broader business what they were working on, external suppliers set up stalls, high- calibre speakers were brought in for the day, and the IT team ran an ideas festival where teams of IT staff pitched their ideas to the business for a $1000 prize.

Attracting hundreds from the business, including AMP's financial services CEO, Barnett says the expo "was a catalyst for a lot of new interest in innovation well beyond IT - so it had an interesting impact.

"There is nothing more powerful than showing people what technology can do for them in the context of their own environment and as a result of the expo we have had several ideas fast-tracked for uptake by the broader business.

"The expo also helped our IT innovation program because we have seen a much greater degree of active leadership by our line managers in setting innovation challenges and objectives with their teams. This has driven up the participation rate of staff across the board and we have nearly doubled our 2005 innovation targets," Barnett says.