Guardian CIO on how innovation and collaboration work together
Date: Nov 29, 2011When Frank Wander took over as CIO of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, he was faced with several challenges in his quest to transform IT. At the time, innovation and collaboration could have seemed like long off goals -- but instead, Wander used them as the basis for turning the IT department around.
In this CIO Innovators video, Wander discusses his philosophy for creating a culture of innovation, which comes down to building a "culture of collaboration."
"People can make a difference," he says, adding that he knows the model works because everyone is contributing to the company’s success.
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Guardian Life transforms IT by putting knowledge workers first
"We don't try to measure [innovation]," he explains. "The business is measuring its goals, and if we are working well together and deciding on all the right things to do … all of this has to show up on the bottom line. At the end of the day, we are growing and the results are the results we need to achieve as a business. We are getting the business results from a collaborative model where people are sharing in the outcome."
In a recent profile of Wander on SearchCIO.com, he delved further into the human side of the innovation equation, acknowledging that the knowledge worker is central to success.
“We have a set of management practices in corporate America that are tied back to the industrial era. We still use the term human resources, as if our people are interchangeable resources like steel or energy," he said. "People are the furthest things from an interchangeable part. In the area of knowledge work, it is the amount of knowledge that they’ve acquired over time and how well they are able to fit into social working environments that make them productive.”
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