By Dave Hansen

The concept of innovation often conjures up notions of huge, monumental shifts in strategies and tactics. But some of today's most effective, innovative IT developments happen in a far more iterative and continuous fashion. Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of big ideas that change the ground rules. But for IT innovation to be a serious, ongoing part of an organization's strategy, CIOs must bring disciplined creativity and an ongoing assessment of current performance against emerging requirements.

Innovation can arise as a by-product of bringing intellectual firepower to solve business problems. It begins with getting focused and setting priorities. Instead of diffusing efforts across many projects, I would advocate a disciplined focus on a small handful of priorities.

For example, I'm in the middle of an employee-development initiative that aims to put the right people on my team in the right places with the right skills. Employee-development and training programs are areas often overlooked by IT organizations, but that's a mistake. I've quickly learned that when an IT department invests wisely in human resources, the technology begins to take care of itself. That's why we've made employee development one of our top priorities. To begin executing on this project, we've found that the employee base can be categorized into roughly a dozen role types. Then we determine the ongoing technical skills, certification and industry standards that each role type demands.

Achieving this objective represents a major investment in people, an activity that far too many executives lose sight of. Technological fixes are easy. An IT team that is oriented along technologies, performance and processes can effectively boost throughput, optimize storage and/or improve security, and then declare victory. But this approach wins the battle, only to lose the war—namely, achieving IT innovations that benefit customers.

What's more, it's important to ensure that IT staffers are well-versed in your company's products and customers. Why? Because for organizations to succeed in today's highly competitive business environment, everyone in the organization, including the IT organization, must help drive sales. Toward that end, I now require everyone on my staff to thoroughly understand CA's Enterprise IT Management vision—and to be able to present this information to customers, if needed.

Another aspect of our employee education effort is a mentoring and staff-rotation program. Through the staff-rotation program, IT staff would go and work in other departments like Services and Development, essentially becoming part of the other department for a six-month period. Similarly, people from other departments will rotate into IT. We are also kicking off an international rotation within the IT department between London and our headquarters in Islandia, N.Y. This will allow IT staff to experience life as customers of the IT department, experiences that will help them focus on customer-based innovations when they return to their regular IT position.

Development
Separately, each person on my staff enrolls in two to three weeks of personal professional development every year. All these initiatives help technologists better enable the business. Through programs like these, technologists learn negotiation, problem-solving and leadership skills.

Finally, CIOs need to get out of the office and meet both internal and external customers face-to-face. We simply cannot afford to lose sight of what our customers need. Nothing—not e-mail, not videoconferencing, not the telephone—can replace the value of a live meeting. I attend on average one external customer event each week. Longer term, I hope to expand my time with customers to fill 40 percent of my workweek. It's that important.

All CIOs need to focus on getting, and keeping, their IT department in order. But we must also learn what our customers need. Only in this way can CIOs help their organizations anticipate and meet the constantly changing requirements of today's dynamic, demanding marketplace. That is true IT innovation.

Dave Hansen is CA's CIO.