Archive for the ‘Strategy’ category

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Building a Culture of Innovation Brick By Brick

May 3rd, 2012

Innovation and creativity have been the lifelines of successful businesses for years but now it seems they’ve been pushed to the forefront more than ever. Innovation can be a huge success driver. Today organizations are realizing that their employees have the ability to generate extraordinary ideas if given the proper environment.  That leads us to the phrase, “creating a culture of innovation.” An innovative culture is one of openness. It allows ideas to be fostered and creativity to flourish. Believe it or not, that means rewarding failure too. So the question then becomes, how do you create such a culture?

Think about the way your organization operates now in terms of its business, processes, and people. Josh Linkner wrote an article for Inc.com called 7 Steps to a Culture of Innovation and some of those steps include ideas like fueling passion, encouraging courage, and failing forward. Collaboration also breeds innovation. However, all of this can mean change in how a company decides to operate and some are reluctant to change with the times. In the ever growing global marketplace companies must adapt to survive and often times change is necessary.

I mentioned people and processes above for a reason. Innovation needs to permeate throughout the organization. For example, in the hiring process, HR needs to look for individuals who are creative and display the characteristics of working well in an innovative and collaborative culture. The Finance department may influence innovation based on how they decide to manage and govern an organization’s risk and investments. Culture infers that everyone has to build innovation into their daily habits and processes in order for the concept to prove fruitful.

Here are a couple of links that deal with creating a culture of innovation in your company:

Avoiding Key Mistakes on the Way to Innovation (Huffington Post)

Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation (Harvard Business Review Blog)

Video: Interview with David Kester, Chief Executive of Design Council (Harvard Business YouTube)

If you are interested in hearing more about creating an innovative culture, IMF members are encouraged to attend our Innovation Forum taking place June 7th - 8th in Atlanta. Matt Manzella, Director of Strategy and Innovation Services at Allstate, will be there to discuss the topic with attendees. For more details on this year’s Innovation Forum, visit the meeting page on our website.

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Posted in IMF Updates, IT Innovation, Strategy

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Solving Password Frustration & Insecurity

April 27th, 2012

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It’s hard to imagine that those tiny dots can lead to such personal frustration and corporate collapse. Passwords in many cases are the only thing standing guard over your sensitive information. From an organization’s perspective, they may have hundreds or even thousands of individual passwords that protect company data and all of them are ripe for the picking. In today’s world you need passwords for everything, from your social networking sites to your online banking account. People are busy running in a million different directions so nobody has the desire to memorize 10-20 passwords. I’m guilty of it as well, using the same password for multiple accounts. This concept of password reuse is the biggest problem with passwords in general according to John Sawyer, who wrote a piece for DarkReading.com called “How to Hack the Password Problem.”

In theory, people are going to do what is easy and convenient for them and memorizing a bunch of passwords falls into neither of those categories. Organizations will typically conduct some kind of security awareness training to emphasize the power of their employees’ passwords and why it is critical they take it seriously. That only goes so far though and what you might end up with are employees putting all of their passwords into an easily accessible spreadsheet or, worse yet, writing them down on a sticky note. Instead, Sawyer recommends simple desktop based management tools like Password Safe or LastPass and enterprise single sign-on solutions such as those offered by Oracle and CA. He ends with this comment, which I think hit the nail on the head in terms of password issues with users:

“…if a company wants to address an issue like passwords, then it has to make it easy for the

user and not rely solely on the user to be the more secure link in the chain.”

Then again, some feel that passwords are becoming obsolete altogether due to their unfriendly nature. How do you feel about passwords in general and what steps does your organization take to address password security?

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Posted in IT Security, IT Workforce, Strategy

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Focus Your Social Media Efforts For Better Results

April 26th, 2012

A couple of weeks ago we talked about “Tops-Down Corporate Social Media” and how an organization’s senior executives should be leading the social media charge for their business. Today, we’re going to take a slightly different approach on corporate social media, one built around choosing a strategy. In this age of social media and social networking it seems like new platforms pop up almost on a daily basis. We all know the big names out there, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Companies are looking to have more of a social media presence in their marketplace but they must first decide which platform is the best vehicle to drive their business towards targeted consumers. There is no limit to how diverse a company’s social media strategy can be but is diversity really the goal? No it’s not. The real goal is reaching your customers and putting a message in front of as many of them as possible. Organizations need to be wary of stretching themselves too thin across too many platforms. Instead focus your efforts where you’ll get the best results. Debra Donston-Miller has a nice article on InformationWeek.com about choosing the social network that makes the most sense for your business. She brings up several good points, including this quote from Jason Breed, Global Social Media practice lead for Accenture and co-founder of www.Hashtagsocialmedia.com:

“It does not matter if you put up a Facebook page while

your customers are complaining on Twitter.”

In other words, know what platforms your customers are using and, taking it a step further, how they are using them. Once you have solved this equation, then you can dedicate your organization’s resources in the right way instead of taking a “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” approach. Again, a lot of companies have the desire to establish a social media presence but they have no real purpose behind their efforts other than simply wanting to be involved in the phenomenon. Queue Jason Breed again:

“You need to do social on purpose–otherwise, you are

simply moving for the sake of motion.”

I suggest you read Debra’s article on the matter as she talks to a couple of business owners about how they developed their company’s social media strategy. It might make you rethink your strategy or lack thereof altogether. For more discussion on this issue, attend our Innovation Forum, June 7th and 8th in Atlanta, to hear PwC’s Carlos Bermudez speak on “Corporate Use of Social Networking to Promote Collaboration.”

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Posted in Social Media, Strategy

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