Forrester Blogs › Category: IT innovation

People In IT Love Stats But They Probably Won’t Love These

Posted by Stephen Mann on the Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Blog on May 3, 2013

Stephen Mann

I’ve written a number of blogs about IT service management (ITSM) and IT service delivery many of which have expressed opinions based on observations and conversations rather than “facts.” A new Forrester report by my colleague Eveline Oehrlich has some facts to substantiate what we already knew even if we chose to ignore it.

These facts reinforce a figure that I use in most presentation to show that without exception IT professionals think that they do a better job than their business colleagues think they do. So we have this perceptions gap or perhaps we should call it a “perceptions gulf.”

The IT perceptions gulf

This is one of those pictures that really is worth a thousand words. In fact all three of these figures make it easy for me to cut short the commentary.

It’s interesting to see the geographical differences but, despite these, we still see a consistent gap or gulf between “How IT thinks it is doing” and “How customers think IT is doing.” Funny how our metrics aren’t a sea of red – in fact our metrics dashboard is often a sea of green.

“But that’s just perceptions” I hear you cry, “We still do a fantastic job in enabling business activities with cutting-edge IT.” But could we do better? Please read on …

Could we improve business productivity?

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How Much Time Do You Spend On Business Innovation?

Posted by Chip Gliedman on the CIOs Blog on October 31, 2012

Chip Gliedman

That’s one of the questions we’re asking in our survey of business innovation practices, organizations, and technology use.

For the last few weeks, Forrester has been fielding a survey on innovation (as well as IT organization and IT governance). Do you want to find out how you stack up in areas such as:

- Innovation teams, processes, and funding models?

- Challenges to successful business innovation?

- Use of technology to support business innovation?

You can take this and the other surveys at: https://forrester.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_56Y0hU6NNIJKwfO (specify "Innovation" up front to go to that part of the survey).

Benchmark data from the survey will feed into our Sustained Business Innovation Playbook. We're aiming to publish the results in December or January. If you're not a client, enter your email at the end of the survey, and we'll share the results with you.

. . . and thanks in advance for sharing your experiences.

Chip Gliedman

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Innovate Or Die: An Introduction To The CIO Innovation Playbook

Posted by Chip Gliedman on the CIOs Blog on September 5, 2012

Chip Gliedman

 "Innovate or die" is not just a catchy slogan. It’s the way that businesses need to operate in this market-driven world. And, as technology underpins more and more products, services, processes, and go-to-market strategies, the CIO must be involved in driving business-impacting innovations. This involvement ranges from supporting internal R&D to unearthing and vetting new technologies out in the market that can be internalized to disrupt the status quo and propel the organization forward.

Most organizations are cognizant of this reality. However, few have mastered making innovation into a sustainable practice with defined processes that take into account the differences between incremental change and true innovation. What is needed is less hyperbole and more practical information and examples of how to the CIO can and should support an innovation process to drive business value.

To deliver, you’ll need to understand and internalize the trends, understand the business capabilities required to deliver on sustainable innovation, and assess how prepared you actually are to deliver. Based on this insight, you then need to plot out a strategy and carefully plan your people, process, and technology. From there you have implement — building out your innovation network, and developing a governance model to enforce the right behaviors. And to continually improve, you need to focus on metrics, peer comparison, and change management.

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Do We Need A Hydrocarbon Smart Grid?

Posted by Holger Kisker on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on June 30, 2011

Holger Kisker

The Oil And Gas Information Technology Innovation Dilemma

The hydrocarbon logistics chain of natural gas and crude oil connects globally distributed exploration and production sites with industrial and private consumers via pipelines, tankers, rail cars, and trucks with massive intermediate buffering storage and conversion facilities (tank farms, refineries, gas plants); it is the lifeblood of our energy supply chain today and for the coming decades.

 

More than 75 million barrels of oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas are produced, transported, and consumed all over the globe — every day. Along the complex transportation chain, these special bulk products, both liquids and gases, are transferred between the different modes of transportation, resulting in a number of challenges based on complex measurements of product volumes and masses:

  • Measurement accuracy. In an ideal world, we would always determine the mass of crude oil and natural gas at each measurement point; however, due to the large quantities involved, weighing is possible only at the very end of the logistics chain. Consequently, we have to live with measurement data that typically carries an uncertainty of 0.1% to 0.5 %, depending on the measurement devices’ intrinsic accuracy.
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