{"id":138,"date":"2019-02-26T10:01:08","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T15:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soulrepair831638256.wordpress.com\/?p=138"},"modified":"2019-02-14T21:16:18","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T02:16:18","slug":"lean-enterprise-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soul-repairs.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/26\/lean-enterprise-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Lean Enterprise Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

(FYI, we’re using affiliate links to Amazon in this post!)<\/span><\/p>\n

Technology innovation is vital. It can\u00a0enable business success – and it can also drive<\/em>\u00a0business innovation.<\/p>\n

If a business falls behind the technology curve, it opens itself up to the risk of under-serving its customers<\/strong>, and eventually being out-maneuvered and defeated\u00a0in the marketplace<\/strong>. This happens over and over to businesses, where a competitor’s technological innovation pushes them right out of existence – see Blockbuster (Netflix), and Border’s (Amazon, B&N). Amazon has also innovated while JC Penney has stagnated – department stores\u00a0could\u00a0<\/em>have taken the world by storm via the internet – but their online presences weren’t good, certainly not as good as their competitors, and therefore neither were their sales figures.<\/p>\n

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On the other hand, if your business keeps up with\u00a0current IT tools, processes, platforms, and techniques, you can speed up your business execution<\/strong> and\u00a0provide a higher quality of service<\/strong> to your customers.\u00a0<\/strong>You can also\u00a0execute higher-efficiency development processes,\u00a0<\/strong>which has the additional benefit of speeding up everything that your IT people do.\u00a0If you think back, there have probably been times in your business’s history where innovation in your systems gave you the chance to leap forward – to serve your customers above expectations, and to out-compete your competitors.<\/p>\n

And, as technologists, newer technology is just more fun<\/strong>, and\u00a0running new technology can be a competitive advantage in the IT hiring market.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to argue with the need to innovate – the hard part is innovating\u00a0successfully over time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lean Enterprise<\/h2>\n

Lean\u00a0concepts are not new.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ever since the manufacturing revolution of the 1980s, companies have tried to apply scientific principles to their work processes<\/a>, and minimize the cost of resources spent doing work that will later be thrown away, or that won’t be needed until much later.<\/p>\n

Changing a large organization is hard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Large organizations have typically been successful over a long period of time, and arrogance, complacency, or some mixture of the two can slowly kill a formerly successful organization – like a ship that doesn’t turn around because it assumes it will never hit that iceberg. Large enterprises also have existing culture and a lot of momentum in the direction they’re already going – and culture<\/em> and organizational momentum<\/em> are the hardest things to change.<\/p>\n

Culture and organizational momentum are the hardest things to change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly wrote\u00a0Lean Enterprise<\/a>\u00a0to apply these existing Lean principles in order to explain how large organizations should continually<\/em> learn and transform themselves.<\/p>\n

Their thesis: by starting small and basing innovation success or failure on measurables, an organization can learn and continually grow and innovate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lean Innovation<\/h2>\n

Their main points are:<\/p>\n