Finding Your Muse

Extrapolating from my experience with artists, I see four basic skills that the innovative CIO needs to cultivate in order to excel at innovation:

1. Immerse yourself in the business. It almost goes without saying that you should have a good grasp of the concepts and rules that guide the business operations of your company. This means a good working understanding of how each business activity fits into the overall business, how the work in each activity is performed, and what the cost and profit factors are.

2. Collaborate frequently. CIOs need to innovate in the face of high levels of complexity in both business processes and technology. Complexity can be handled more easily if groups of people from IT and business units work together, bringing their complementary skills to bear on a problem. The innovative CIO orchestrates this process.

3. Tolerate uncertainty. It is an act of discipline and sometimes of courage to immerse oneself in the details of a problem and resist the temptation to rush to judgment about what should be done. Because of the complexity inherent in most business problems, it is unlikely that the first few ideas to come along will be truly innovative. Don't dismiss ideas just because they defy preconceived notions, and don't give in to pressure to start building something before you get the inspiration you need.

4. Look for simple patterns. As you investigate ideas and combine them in different ways to create system designs, look for designs where all the elements fit together in a simple, logical and complementary fashion. Remember that complex system designs usually signify that solutions have not been completely explored. When you find a simple combination of workflow processes and technology that can satisfy a wide variety of business requirements, then you have an innovative design.

Simplicity is important to artists because audiences can understand simple patterns of expression more easily, and so these are an effective way to communicate ideas. Simplicity in system design works well for a CIO because system designs that are uncomplicated are more likely to be built successfully and more likely to perform as expected.

As you and your team develop these four skills, you will see a remarkable increase in the innovation that happens in your organization. We CIOs are already good at working long and hard to get things done. When we combine that ability with an ability to discover inspirational ideas, then we unleash a powerful process for giving our companies the tools they need to compete and succeed.

Finally, remember that innovation is an art more than a science. As you become an innovator, you become an artist. So do as the artists do when you finish that big project - get out of town. Don't bring your BlackBerry. Have fun. All work and no play makes a dull CIO, and no dull CIO has a chance as an innovator.

Michael Hugos is a partner in AgiLinks, a software company specializing in agile supply chains. He is former CIO of Network Services and author of Essentials of Supply Chain Management