January 1, 2004

Let Innovation Thrive

Perhaps no ingredient is more important to business success than innovation. How can your organization deploy knowledge and information management to enable it to thrive throughout the enterprise?

by Stewart McKie

Continued from Page 2

Product development management technology supports the realization of a product (or service) deliverable after an idea has been selected for commercialization. The main purpose of this technology is to help manage the product development life cycle from design to release. Environmental innovation management supports the "scanning" process by monitoring the environment for what Gartner calls "innovation indicators." This kind of tool is a foundation for competitive intelligence initiatives and can help businesses move from a reactive to a proactive mode of innovation.

Finally, Gartner describes "outside-the-box" innovation management tools as those designed to support the "sparking" process: the creative thinking by individuals and teams that can lead to innovation. This creative thinking may be either "blue-sky" or problem-based: but it depends on a culture that provides the time and space for these kinds of activities.

In the next part of this series, I will review the domains of environmental scanning, creative thinking, and idea management in terms of the technology available to support them. Then in the final part, I'll do the same for the new product development and innovation life-cycle management domains.

Stewart McKie is an independent consultant and technology writer specializing in analytic, enterprise resource management, and Web services applications. Reach him via his Web site at www.cfoinfo.com.

Resources

Bellon, B. and G. Whittington, Competing Through Innovation: Essential Strategies for Small and Medium-Sized Firms, Oak Tree Press, 1996.

Carroll, L., "Ashridge Learning Guide — Innovation," Ashridge Management College, 2003.

Deschamps, J. P., "Managing Innovation: From Serendipity to Process," Prism, 2nd Quarter, 1995, pp. 35-55.

Drucker, P., Innovation and Entrepreneurship, HarperBusiness, 1993.

"Fast, Focused, and Fertile: The Innovation Evolution," study by Cheskin & Fitch: Worldwide, 1996.

"Innovation — A Way of Being," report by The Talent Foundation, 2003.

Rigby, D. and C. Zook, "Open Market Innovation," Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2002.

Rozwell, C., K. Harris, and F. Caldwell, "Survey of Innovation Management Technology," Gartner Research, January 2002, Markets, M-15-1388.

Stewart, T. A., Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, Doubleday, 1997.

Seven Sources For Innovative Opportunity

1. The unexpected (for example, product/service success or failure or outside event)
2. The incongruity (for example, the gap between what is and what should be)
3. Process need (for example, process gaps or bottlenecks)
4. Structural change (for example, in industries or markets)
5. Demographics (for example, population, education, income changes)
6. Mood swings (for example, in what is in or out, acceptable or not)
7. New knowledge (for example, scientific advances).

(Adapted by this author from Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles by Peter F. Drucker, HarperBusiness, 1993.)

Ten Principles For Managing Intellectual Capital

1. Companies don't own human and customer capital, they share ownership with their employees and business partners.
2. Companies need to foster teamwork and communities of practice because interdisciplinary teams capture, formalize, and capitalize talent.
3. Organizational wealth is created around skills and talents that are proprietary and strategic.
4. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to work with your people.
5. Make sure the knowledge you need is either ready-to-hand or easy to get.
6. Ask the question: Can inexpensive intangibles do the work of costly physical assets?
7. Knowledge work is custom work that depends less on mass-produced solutions than special relationships between supplier and customer.
8. Knowledge work is generally found downstream of the value chain and closer to customers.
9. Focus on information flows rather than material flows.
10. Human, structural, and customer capital work together to create intellectual capital.

(Adapted by this author from Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations by Thomas A. Stewart, Doubleday, 1997.)

Five Catalysts For Innovation

1. Consciousness: Each person knows the goals of the organization and believes they can play a part in achieving them.
2. Multiplicity: Teams and groups contain a wide and creative mix of skills, experiences, backgrounds, and ideas.
3. Connectivity: Relationships are strong and trusting, and are actively encouraged and supported within and across teams and functions.
4. Accessibility: Doors and minds are open; everyone in the organization has access to resources, time, and decision makers.
5. Consistency: Commitment to innovation runs right through the organization and is built into processes and leadership style.

(Source: "Innovation — A Way of Being," report by The Talent Foundation, 2003.)

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The marriage of application integration and BI is a foregone conclusion. Those who embrace this technology may have the competitive advantage that will help them dominate their markets. Those who don't might be left behind.

Stewart McKie is an independent consultant and technology writer specializing in analytic, enterprise resource management, and Web services applications. Reach him via his Web site at www.cfoinfo.com

Using Ontologies to Link BI and EAI

Most application integration occurs at the information level. You must therefore always deal with semantics and how to describe semantics relative to a multitude of information systems. You also need to formalize this process, putting some additional methodology and technology behind the management of metadata, as well as the relationships therein.

To this end, many in the world of application integration and BI have begun to adopt the notion of ontology. Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to the science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and how they are related. Ontologies are important to application integration and BI solutions because they give us a shared and common understanding of the data (and, in some cases, services and processes) that exists within an application integration problem domain. They also help facilitate communication between people and information systems.

By leveraging the ontology concept, you can organize, manage, and share enterprise information, content, and knowledge, providing better interoperability and integration of information systems within and among companies. You can also layer common ontologies within domains with repeatable patterns.

The view of ontologies was best summarized by Quine, who claimed that ontology asks, "What is there?" The answer: everything. In the context of integration and BI, each information system is regarded as a theory that recognizes the existence of a set of objects: its own ontology.

At its essence, ontology is a conceptual information model. Ontologies describe things that exist in a problem domain. These include properties, concepts, and rules, and how they relate one to another, supporting a standard reference model for information integration (the link to application integration) as well as analysis. Ontologies are useful in the science of application integration and BI because they support the human understanding of information. This use is self-explanatory within the context of application integration.

Ontologies facilitate information-based access and information integration across very different information systems. You achieve this by formalizing the application semantics between intra- and interorganizational information resources.

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