Organizational teamwork starts the IT innovation process

Organizational teamwork starts the IT innovation process

Organizational teamwork starts the IT innovation process

Date: Jun 28, 2011

Bryan Smith, CIO and vice president at Volvo Construction Equipment North America Inc. in Asheville, N.C., downplays the role of the individual CIO as a source of innovation. To him, the CIO has a role in coordinating organizational teamwork, and that means making sure every team member has a role in creating an innovative environment.

"In my position, I am more of a business guy who understands information technology," Smith says in this video, which is part of the SearchCIO.com CIO Innovators series. "I don't come from the strictly IT side."

"But as part of the process," he says, "we really believe that everybody on the team needs to understand what other people are working on. You might have a subject matter expert in one area; but everybody in our organization, in my team, needs to understand what the goals are, and everybody needs to be aligned with that."

Successful organizational teamwork, Smith says, is the collective ability to manage and deal with change, or as he says, "getting out of your comfort zone." People who resist change, he says, "frequently … will take themselves out of a game one way or another because it's too uncomfortable for them."

In technology terms, integration also plays a major role in developing innovation. Application integration has enabled better ways of working with business partners, and that in turn has created new ways to innovate.

"Because it's gotten so much easier to integrate, you're not as afraid of integrating with a variety of systems," Smith says. "So, we have a dealer that has selected a non-recommended system [because] they felt like that was the right solution for them. They're a large dealer, nearly close to 10% of our North American business, [and] we certainly want to have [a] seamless, smooth transaction flow with them."

"So, what do we need to do?" he adds. "We need to get on the stick and make sure the integration points are there for the high-transaction activities to get going between us and that dealer."

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