Brian D. Goodman

Changing the corporate IT development model: tapping the power of grassroots computing

The recent rise of grassroots computing among both professional programmers and knowledge workers highlights an alternative approach to software development in the enterprise: Situational applications are created rapidly by teams or individuals who best understand the business need, but without the overhead and formality of traditional information technology (IT) methods. Corporate IT will be increasingly challenged to facilitate the development, integration, and management of both situational and enterprise applications. In this paper, we describe the emerging prevalence of situational application development and the changing role of IT. We also describe the experience at IBM in building, deploying, and managing the IBM Situational Applications Environment that enables employees to take responsibility for some of their own solutions. Finally, we discuss ways in which the situational application development paradigm may evolve in coming years to benefit enterprises, the demands that it will put on IT departments, and possible ways to address these challenges.

Engaging a corporate community to manage technology and embrace innovation

It has been estimated that approximately 50 percent of technology implementation failures are due to scheduling and budget issues and 27 percent are due to customer dissatisfaction. If typical technology solutions face these odds, how can riskier emerging technology and innovation activities succeed? This paper describes the IBM Technology Adoption Program (TAP), an effort by its technology and innovation team to formalize its innovation management discipline. Instead of using structured governing processes, the program uses an organic approach for accelerating change. TAP is focused on cultivating and harnessing the existing early adopter and innovator communities within the enterprise to shorten the technical development cycle and deliver solutions that engage a variety of users, ensuring rapid, widespread accommodation. We describe TAP in the context of the challenges enterprises face in fostering and measuring innovation, focusing on three key areas: rallying the community, encouraging the technical investment supporting the community, and gauging the priority and value of new technology. We present several examples to illustrate the benefits that materialize from overcoming obstacles and delivering significant innovation.

Freeing creativity by understanding the role of best practices

Best practices are the encapsulation of experience that when repeated attempt to achieve similar outcomes. Many professions, including management, software engineering and user experience design, leverage best practices, their practitioners creating them as often as the professional landscape changes because of culture, business conditions or technology. While best practices offer the means for communicating known approaches to common challenges, they also tend toward boxing creativity-presuming the answer-which can inadvertently inhibit innovation. This paper describes best practices, offers two case studies illustrating where best practices go awry and offers the suggestion that following too close to the book can stifle creativity and innovation.