About 45 percent of respondents to the State of the Asian CIO 2007 survey have no individuals or teams specifically devoted to vetting emerging technologies that might contribute to a business innovation. And although around 59 percent labor under the belief that IT should proactively envision business possibilities and initiate them with technology, and 91 percent think that the modest to significant part of their role is about bringing ideas for IT-enabled business innovation to the board room–only 16.77 percent actually lead innovation initiatives across their enterprises.
The upside is that 61 percent are co-leading innovation initiatives with business executive sponsors, and 82 percent believe the IT function’s role and theirs in driving business innovation have become somewhat to significantly more important in the last one to two years. For more good news, 97 percent of senior information executives in the study stake IT’s claim on driving some measure of business innovation at their respective organizations today, in comparison with the 93.41 percent registered for the last 1-2 years.
That sounds promising indeed, but here’s a reminder: the questions on innovation have been on the State of the Asian CIO survey questionnaire for a number of years now. The numbers were not this good before.
The truth is, not all IT heads can think business–which is requisite of a strategic CIO–and not all those that can, have the executive support and resources they need to effect business transformation. Which is why the ones that do achieve such a feat also gain the IT practitioner community’s equivalent of rock star celebrity. Among them, Rosina Howe-Teo of Singapore’s Land Transport Authority, Waleed Hanafi of Global Refund, and Wu Choy Peng of Neptune Orient Lines.
The Link
When an enterprise finds such special individuals–leaders with both technology expertise and driven business acumen– it should set them up for bigger tasks. That is what global leader in sports apparel maker adidas AG did when they rolled innovation into Rainer Duespohl’s portfolio a little more than a year ago.
Now Duespohl, Head of Innovation, Global IT, adidas AG, runs a global function that spans three major regions: the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. At the top of his to-do list in recent years have been activities associated with kickstarting, maintaining and enhancing a knowledge management (KM) program within the adidas organization, through the use of IT.
“I am responsible here [in Hong Kong] for this global function that has as its main objective the provision of ways and means to our people to exploit new business opportunities or areas of business growth. That means we see to giving the business users the right platform, tools and whatever technologies it takes to help them on the process and creative side,” says Duespohl, whose setup handles the task methodically. “We start with the business strategy, move on to crafting the innovation strategy, and then identify the technology roadmaps that deliver the greatest benefits to our internal customers, the various business departments.”
The KM program looks to be at the center of Duespohl’s global function, but he is not likely to call it anything more than a fundamental part of Adidas’ innovation initiative. The users and the intellectual assets they possess are the focus of his efforts. The KM program, and the collaborative and information sharing infrastructure he has put together to support it, are just the “link,” he stresses.
“It is not the core of innovation itself. It’s a platform for sharing and collaboration, bringing our people together, helping them to be more efficient and continually moving forward on the innovation front,” says Duespohl, who goes on to tell of the first few problems his program was meant to solve. “People still thought in silos and not sharing or collaborating as much as they could. Now, if your business is growing 20 to 40 percent in several areas at once, bringing new people in, introducing new processes, establishing more customer relationships and such, you want to be able to make sure that the collective business knowledge and store of best practices at your organization are available to as many of your people in as many places in the world as possible.”
Taking it further, Duespohl points to the platform as a versatile, effective, secure and reliable means of collating, storing and distributing the tacit knowledge resident in adidas business employees’ heads. “This way we could reuse what we have learnt, for instance taking from our experience in the Japanese market and applying it to other countries where applicable.” Duespohl says.
Selling Points
By Duespohl’s recollection, the KM program started in the second half of 2006, and was up and running fairly quickly. According to him, given the nature of adidas’ business, something like KM could not have come too soon. Consider the enormous difficulties associated with having to maintain the marketing and online brand consistency of your company across three geographies, even as you are managing multiple production centers around the world, and getting your different business units to drive new product and process innovation throughout your organization.
The challenges were obvious, but Duespohl had help from the top. “From the beginning, the initiative was seen as a key element of our Asian business roadmap. Top management was driving the KM program, with excellent ownership and full commitment to it, making it less difficult,” says Duespohl, thankful for the support. “After all, it was not your typical IT system that everyone knew you just had to have in order to keep the business running. It was not like an SAP rollout. Right from the start we knew that this was a journey where we didn’t know 100 percent exactly where each milestone was and the spread of the road map. We knew we just had to move forward bit by bit, checking the results of our efforts step by step, before moving on to the next market. That’s the character of the journey typically to be found in KM projects.”
The big challenge from day one was meeting time-to-market deadlines. “Normally, a huge program such as this one would take anywhere from one to three years to develop and get up and running,” says Duespohl, who at the time saw to it that his team started small for obvious reasons. “We were on a steep learning curve, and instead of doing what we normally do–that is, roll out a huge system to hundreds of users all at once–we planned on deploying it in a more targeted manner to specific departments or units of the business, and concentrating on delivering quality across the system to them.”
Steep learning curve
Having to go on a steep learning curve with the program also meant Duespohl and his team had to minimize the risks of going with new technology, and make the most of their already strong and reliable infrastructure. “Here we were, facing time-to-market pressures, and driven to select a platform tool quickly,” says Duespohl, who, however, did not need too much time to evaluate and choose the familiar, tried and tested. He opted to expand adidas’ relationship with enterprise content management solutions provider Interwoven. “Since 2000, we had been using one or another component or application from the Interwoven suite of solutions,” says Duespohl, who describes the Interwoven Worksite MP solution he chose to build his KM platform with as “the best fit, as the true document management and collaboration tool” that offered easier integration with their existing digital assets, which were being already managed by Interwoven technologies. So right from the get go, they could already use the major functionalities of Worksite, maneuvering around with ease, and doing what they should be able to do to start the KM program running.”
“Among the lessons we’ve drawn from this initiative is that user adoption can be significantly driven if we emphasize the landscape of their work environment,”Duespohl says.
Horse and Water
As an enterprise IT leader that has spent almost two decades working intimately with the business-side of a broad range of industries–including media (television and music), e-commerce, and scientific research and development in artificial intelligence–Duespohl knows the difficulties involved in getting people to share their intellectual assets in an organization’s KM program. In more cases than not, it calls to mind that old idiom about leading a horse to water. If we were to go by that analogy, Duespohl for his part usually concentrates on making the way to water faster, easier and familiar for the horse. In the case of the system setup for the KM program, he leveraged the familiarity of his people and their proficiency with MS Outlook and other Interwoven suite solutions to get them to use Worksite MP.
And Duespohl goes one step further. He makes the water sweeter. “Everything is smoothly integrated in that environment and your users don’t have to change how they work with the information systems,” he says. “And for reusing information. We’re not just building a large database just to have it there. It’s there for the business to use to drive their bottom lines and strategic growth.”
Going Global
Currently working on expanding the base of users under his KM program, Duespohl intends to keep placing emphasis on what he recognises–to his credit–as his organization’s most important assets, its people. “Empowering knowledge management champions, building an organization around KM and the governance around it,” he says. “Those have to go together for your program to succeed, whatever technology, whatever product, whatever vendor you select to build the platform facilitating it.”
The expansion Duespohl talks about is hierarchical as well as geographical. “The next level is taking this out of the Asia Pacific and going global across our organization with it,” he says. “I take care of the US and Europe as well, so we’re working with the business to grow the program to cover the rest of the world starting with those two large regions.”
