Building an Innovation Architecture to Support Performance and Success

This post is part of our continuing series, Your Guide to a Successful Digital Transformation.

To support the performance and success of your digital transformation initiative, you will need innovation architecture.

For a better understanding of the concept of innovation architecture in your organization, consider these questions:

Do our processes allow time and space for innovation?

Early on, innovation requires time and effort to determine whether an idea is feasible and valuable. Does your strategy give people intentional time to consider potential enhancements? Leadership should not assume that people will come across innovative ideas in course of their regular work. Management teams need to build in intentional time for innovation and to keep the focus on identifying new and different ways to process the daily work front-of-mind. Without this time for innovation, key people may disengage from the program, development ideas will stagnate, and the transformative continuous improvement process will revert into the current implementation lifecycle.

Do we know our transformation success criteria (e.g. ROI, processes, timeframes, etc.)?

Defining success criteria helps target the best areas on which to focus. Do you want to have an ROI in under two years with less than six months of development time? This criteria would take efforts away from other projects but helps focus efforts on those improvements that are most valuable to the organization.

Do we have a defined engagement method?

How are we going to engage with our innovators, encourage accountability in the development process and maintain prioritization of the identification of new activities? Consistent and direct engagement drives continued performance.

Do we have a method for dedicating resources to the innovation process?

Those involved in the innovation and development process often ask “How am I going to do this at the same time as I do my day job?” Does your strategy consider how to allocate time to the selected projects, either by temporarily reassigning duties from the innovation teams to others or by having support resources dedicated to the innovation and development process?

Have we considered how to design our Citizen Developer process?

As the organization transforms, more staff will become developers in their own right and will be able to create solutions in their spare time. Are we structuring a governance process to encourage innovation by Citizen Developers while maintaining control of critical data components? Does our process consider how to make our Citizen Developers feel valued, especially when an idea they have committed time and effort to developing is halted in the development process?

For information about how we can assist in your organization’s digital transformation, contact us. We are here to help.

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