This will make me sound far more cultured and interesting than I actually am, but I'm a seasoned Radio 4 listener now, and I'm certainly way past being ashamed of it! Anyway, Grayson Perry has been delivering the Reith Lectures this year, giving his thoughts on art's place in modern society and culture. They're fun lectures and as someone who is a self-professed ignoramus in all things "arty", they've been really interesting so far. It's always nice to get an insight into worlds with high entry barriers. You should be able to get them off Aunty for a re-listen.
Part of the talk today was talking about innovation, and that now "anything can be art", artists these days are often only tweaking things that have come before. As anything can be art, nothing really new will appear, although that's not to say exciting things won't be created (I'm precising here, and probably lazily as well!).
According to Grayson Perry, many artists use technology as a starting point for new projects - Photoshop (and it's ilk) being the prime example. Which led him to make the statement that technology is more innovative than art. Which was interesting coming from an artist (who Morlocks like me brand as "technophobes" or (worse) "luddites").
Now, everyone knows about the rate of change in technology - it's terrifying trying to keep up with everything that's going, if not nigh on impossible. It's not news that technology is innovative. And I mean beyond the consumer view of "more pixels", "more transistors", "more bytes per second" or "more MP3s in your pocket" (these are iterations, not innovations, the inexorable progress of "more is better") through to things that, as a sys admin, really change how you work and how you think about Getting Things Done.
Innovation in the IT world doesn't have to mean inventing a game changing piece of software from scratch, slapping the GPL on it, and watching it become an industry standard. There is often the most to gain for IT teams in innovating the how, not the what. If throwing more resource, more staff, and more of everyone's time at a process is the only way you can speed up that process, then you're probably asking the wrong questions.
What has lately become news to me is that there are IT departments out there that actively avoid change to process with reasoning like "this is how it's always been done, and it works fine". They do not take the step of asking "how would this work in an estate 10 times the size of the one we have now?". Or worse, they know there's a problem but take no action. There are IT departments out there that actively avoid innovation.
The immediate dangers this exposes a business to are clear, and have all been pointed out before, by people far better qualified than I. To put it bluntly, innovate or die. You are going to have to be more cost-efficient (the bottom line is always the most important thing in a business, no matter what marketing tells you). You are going to start to virtualise your infrastructure (even partly). You will (hopefully) take that opportunity to split services out into individual containers. This will mean you'll have more hosts to manage, but each will be more simple. If you're really lucky, you might be in a company that has a product people want, and business is booming. Again, more to manage. This means you have to be as efficient as possible right now. Not once the estate has grown, but now. Put systems in place that will pave the way for painless growth. Of course, that's easier said than done, but if it wasn't difficult, it wouldn't be worth doing.
However, there is one other extremely important benefit to being an innovative IT department, and that is it stimulates and engages your staff. Good IT staff like IT. Good IT staff are intelligent and curious ("good" versus "bad" IT staff is another topic entirely). They need a creative environment to work in, and with the current rate of change of technology, IT departments should be breeding grounds for ideas and experiments (you do have a virtualisation platform that your IT staff can experiment and test on, don’t you?), from which viable and scalable solutions to your problems will arise. A good IT manager is of course the one that can catch the useful ideas and see them through to full implementation. Just recognising good ideas isn’t enough - they need to be implemented to make staff feel valued. Recognising a useful innovation and not doing anything with it is worse than not recognising it in the first place.
Innovation is crucial to an IT department. Without it, your business will die from the inside if your staff don’t first.
