How to become an IT Innovator

Innovation has become a top concern for companies seeking a competitive edge in today’s business world, especially as more organizations face new competitors that are using technology as a business disruptor.

In The Conference Board’s “CEO Challenge 2013” report, innovation was third on the list of top CEO challenges, after “human capital” and “operational excellence.”

Ideally, companies would formalize their innovation processes, governance and incentives to support a continuous program, says Chip Gliedman, an analyst at Forrester.  But of course, not everyone is at that stage. In some cases, IT professionals themselves need to take a page from Ghandi and “be the innovation they want to see in the world.”

This is the position that Niel Nickolaisen, CIO at Western Governors University, found himself in when the university wanted to improve graduation rates by helping students who were at risk of failing their coursework.

Nickolaisen had been in the job less than a year when he started up a skunkworks operation to begin experimenting on an analytics-based solution – and began changing the university’s tolerance for experimentation as a result. Nickolaisen provided advice on what others could do to ease their organizations into a culture of innovation.

The roots of innovation

First, a little background on the situation Nickolaisen faced at Western Governors. Founded by the governors of 19 states, the fully accredited, nonprofit online university serves about 40,000  students throughout the U.S. Degrees are competency-based, and coursework is self-paced, meaning there is no tracking of “seat time” or credit hours; instead, competency is demonstrated only when students pass the course exam.

This approach works well for the university’s target audience: adult learners who need a flexible approach to earning a degree. But it also created an information gap; for instance, there was no way to assess how students were doing until they passed or failed the exam or whether certain behaviors — like a prolonged period of inactivity – indicated a potential problem. “They could be in danger of dropping out or on vacation,” Nickolaisen says.

That’s where the need for technology innovation came in. A small team in IT, led by Nickolaisen, began working on a way to analyze and profile student behaviors in order to advise at-risk students on how to stay on-track in their studies. And they had to do this in a way that did not invade student privacy, such as extending the browser, using cookies or requiring students to download an app that tracked their activities.

The ultimate solution involves two steps. First, when a student enrolls for a course, they complete a pre-assessment of their competencies, which turns into a profile of that student. Meanwhile, the competency information is also generalized to develop an overall profile of the strengths and weaknesses of the typical student who enrolls in a particular degree program, whether it’s nursing, teaching or IT. This gives the university a macro-level idea of which courses the student will likely need extra help in. “The general stereotypes hold true,” Nickolaisen says. For instance, the failure rate in writing and communication in the IT degree program is 70%.  

Second, IT developed a way to proxy student activity only within the courses themselves. By anonymizing data on how students who ultimately passed their exams spent their time on the online coursework, they could build a profile of what successful behavior looks like — for instance, how much time they spent on particular units in the course. Armed with this information, faculty advisers could work more proactively with students who do not match the profile of successful behavior. “Without this information on course consumption habits, they would treat everyone the same,” Nickolaisen says. “We wanted to help students proactively, not passively.”

The system is currently being piloted by the university, and Nickolaisen’s group continues to experiment with what it can ultimately do. For instance, there are plans to integrate social network data to further develop student profiles.

Best practices for burgeoning innovators

Finding and building the solution itself was a victory, Nickolaisen says, but even more gratifying was how the work has helped to change the university’s appetite for innovation. Here are a few of his best practices for getting this done.

1.  Focus your efforts: Google might have the resources to tell engineers to innovate freely, but “they have unlimited resources, and we don’t,” Nickolaisen says. Instead, he made sure his team focused on a specific problem that needed to be solved: analyzing and profiling student behaviors with the goal of providing proactive advice that would lead to increased student success.

2. Start small: One of Nickolaisen’s mottos is that the worst time to make a commitment is when you know the least, “and the time when you always know the least is at at the beginning of an innovation initiative,” he says. That’s why he started with very small-scale experiments, with the intent to “learn as we go and refine our focus as we learn,” he says.

One advantage of starting small is how quickly you can produce results; for instance, developing a working prototype for the student-support solution took just eight weeks.

“We had a small team and tested it out on a tiny subset of data, students and staff to see if it had any hope of working,” Nickolaisen says. “We also tested it on a subset of technology – we didn’t need to know if it would work on every known browser type, because if it didn’t work for one, it wouldn’t work for any.”

Technologists have a tendency to want to deal with all the what-ifs, Nickolaisen says. “But you need to first see if you can find a tiny solution and expand from there. It’s a natural human desire to solve the problem ‘today.’ But we’re not going to solve the whole problem today, just a piece of the problem.”

3. Learn about innovation processes like agile: Agile principles like iterative development or the Stage-Gate approach are widely used in innovation environments, and Nickolaisen agrees that innovation for his team would not have worked if they did not implement agile principles and the idea of “learn as we go,” he says. “But sometimes you have to experiment with the idea of experimentation. In other words, do an agile implementation of agile by picking just one thing you’re going to get good at and then moving on to the next thing.”

4. Find (or be) a leader: Behaviors like “just solving a piece of the problem” might be commonsense, but they’re also counterintuitive, which is why innovation efforts need leadership, direction and someone there to facilitate, Nickolaisen says. “The leader also needs to provide air cover from others in the organization who want certainty that the solution is going to work and who want us to make commitments before we’re ready,” he says. Much of that air cover, he says, comes from developing IT credibility by consistently providing the operational basics. “Existing credibility is essential – we must have an earned reputation for solid delivery and excellent decision-making,” he says. “If the organization thinks IT is the gang that cannot shoot straight, there is almost no way the organization will support the effort.”

5. Embrace failure: Learning from failure is an essential part of innovation, Nickolaisen says. That’s why he wanted his team to operate without any predisposed rules except for one: The solution could not involve monitoring students “in a Big Brother way,” he says. “We set the expectation that we expected to fail repeatedly, but that was fine as long as the failures led us toward a solution. We also set the expectation that we would try anything and everything.”

The resulting failures, he says, ultimately turned into the solution. “Every idea at first failed miserably,” he says. “But from one of the failures came another idea that also failed, and from that failure came an idea that worked.”

Importantly, “We’d get together after each failure to discuss what we learned, what worked and whether there was anything there to point us in a different direction.”

6. Help the organization accept uncertainty: Innovation involves experimentation, and experimentation involves uncertainty. But since people naturally crave certainty, Nickolaisen says, innovation causes a natural tension between the desire for something new and the need for stability. Changing that culture requires constant communication and also the ability to show people actual results of the experimentation. For instance, the next step is to conduct real-time assessments of the student-support solution to see how well it works on two groups of students – a control group and one that will be told, “for students like you, this is the best path to pass the course,” he says. “Doing this allows us to see if there is a difference in their pass rates.” This will lead to more experimentation, he says, like what happens to enrollments if the Web site is redesigned. The result: “We’re starting to change the culture,” he says. “We’re  more tolerant of experimentation and uncertainty.”

7. Borrow ideas from others: Nickolaisen worked with a small team of existing staff, as well as “some really, really smart providers,” he says. The team also met with peers in industries outside of higher education that had done work on tracking and analyzing customer behavior. “We’d search our networks to see if anyone knew someone in a particular company, or we’d go to events to meet people,” he says. Often, Nickolaisen says, innovations are really just variations on something that someone else is already doing. “We took an approach that others have used, but we’re doing it differently from them,” he says.

The need to innovate won’t go away anytime soon, especially as technology disruption continues to be the hinge on which competition turns. Rather than waiting around for your organization to develop a culture of innovation on its own, it might be time to begin a skunkworks operation of your own.  

Brandel is a freelance writer. She can be reached at marybrandel@verizon.net.