The IT Leaders’ Guide to Building an Innovative Organization

In today’s digital age, technology leaders possess a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of driving growth and innovation through several traits and transformation strategies. Some of these traits require experience and being deep in the trenches of execution; some intuition, and the ability to analyze the direction you desire to take the business. Ritesh Ramesh, Chief Operating Officer at MDaudit, in the first part of this guide, shares insights and best practices for leaders to enable a culture of innovation with the right traits and tactics.

Technology leaders must be great leaders who can reimagine the future of their business, motivate, empower, influence and collaborate with their own teams and cross-functional teams on the digital strategy and execution journey.

Necessary Traits to Drive Innovation

For a leader to drive innovation (IT or otherwise) requires the five following traits:

1. A bilingual strategist with well-rounded business and technology acumen. Several opportunities and assets are available for CTOs in their toolkit to create a sustainable growth-oriented digital strategy with cloud, data, APIs (application programming interfaces), AI, platforms and apps. No longer is it enough for CTOs to define technology stacks, manage costs and select software vendors and tools. They must possess a strategic mindset to collaborate with business leaders as they reimagine their business models and execute digital transformations. Technology leaders must be able to educate, socialize and influence the CEO, the management team and the board on appropriate capital allocation strategies and the right R&D investment areas to create shareholder value. They also need to keep abreast with the industry, business and technology trends as they think through their future state technology vision and roadmap.
2. A strong collaborator with commercial acumen can articulate the technology vision to cross-functional stakeholders across the organization and drive alignment with their respective go-to-market strategies. Sales, marketing, customer success, implementation and support, training and finance functions play a critical role in the commercial success of the technology platform being built. If the CTO cannot translate the technology capabilities into value propositions and ROI stories for the commercial functions in relatable terminology to enable their respective go-to-market strategies, the overall goal of enterprise value creation will fail. Many well-built digital platform businesses fail because of poor commercial strategy, and the technology and commercial engines cannot work in synchronization toward common business goals.
3. A strong coach-player personality can motivate and empower product and technology teams to think beyond technology as they implement technical solutions. One critical area is to think about holistic ways to integrate customer, market and competitor feedback processes into the software development lifecycle iteratively in real-time so that the product and technical teams are not operating with tunnel vision when it comes to product strategies and technical implementation. This includes product teams driving customer advisory boards for input, customer success teams running business reviews and NPS surveys with customers and engineering teams running user experience surveys through the platform. All these capabilities require technology teams to think with a design-thinking mindset. This is easier said than done, and this is where technology leaders can set the pace as role models for others to follow.
4. Strong relationship builder with the board and external stakeholders to drive buy-in to the platform vision and associated external risks – be it competitor threats, cyber risks or a macro-level industry trend. As critical as it is to report progress on current state initiatives to the board, a technology leader must play an essential role in laying out a progressive roadmap that is future-proofed to drive business growth and shareholder value. The CTO must be able to translate complex technical jargon into simple value statements that articulate the “why” with business benefits. Many customers buy products not just for existing functionality but also for future functionality and vision. This is where CTOs can play a critical role, even working with the Sales and Marketing functions to develop vision and roadmap artifacts to drive commercial strategy.
5. Strong builder of trust and transparency with third-party vendors to forge strategic partnerships and an innovation ecosystem beyond the internal technology teams. CTOs can easily fall into the trap of building every single technology in-house, thus prioritizing perfection versus speed even when there is nothing proprietary in what they are building to drive competitive advantage. Vendors specializing in specific technology areas can play a critical role in helping scale digital platforms faster so that companies can focus on problem formulation, user experience and customization of functionality to meet the end user needs. There are also opportunities to co-develop products with vendors for specific industry problems and share revenue.

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Key Strategies to Build

Additionally, leading transformation in an organization requires taking the following tactics:

1. Reconcile activity with intent: Where are your roadmaps taking you, and are you following them based on your achievement review? Are you delivering new systems or solutions in a better-than-before manner (agile, continuous, user-focused)?
2. Connect the human to the humanity of processes: Are you investing in people and their skills, hiring new talent, listening to responses and stimulus from users to better serve them, implementing solutions or practices that are best for those the IT serves rather than implementing IT for IT’s sake?
3. Solutions, not problems: Are you focused on solutions rather than the problems driving the solutions? Are you using a solutions-first approach to innovation where it counts – with customers and partners?
4. Adjust targets based on success rather than failures: Again, use success as your True North. Are you planning success and customer satisfaction targets, or are you focused on mitigating failure?

It is thus essential to build a culture where these traits and tactics can be instilled throughout all systems and processes. While the onus to create an organization that drives innovation does not stay limited to technology leaders, the will to keep the innovation wheels churning flows top-down and needs to be clearly translated for every other team member to ensure it is a group effort to change, grow and evolve.

How are you driving innovation? Tell us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . And stay tuned for part two of this guide.

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