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May 3, 2007
Cutter Summit 2007 – Lynne Ellyn; Is Innovation Relevant to IT?
Lynne is VP and CIO at DTE Energy. She and I have enjoyed much of this conference sitting together in the back row, and she now takes the stage. Her IT operation is nearly 850 employees and is responsible for [get the stats from her slide].
In a nutshell, Lynne’s answer to this question is an unqualified yes, and she shows a timeline showing IT’s role in various industries over a 40 year period. Innovation has been there all along. Within DTE Energy, she cites examples like neural networks to optimize and forecast power demand, price analysis for electricity, and interactive voice recognition.
Given that innovation matters, DTE Energy gets innovative results by encouraging innovative behavior. It is recognized, celebrated, and rewarded. I’m impressed that this is explicitly managed and incentivized. She says that the culture “creates a state” where innovation is fostered within the company. It is for the clear intentions and purposes to increase revenue while reducing costs, improving service to its customers, manage better, and differentiate DTE from the competition.
I should note that Lynne stated earlier in the presentation that they chose an INSOURCING strategy to bring this about. This doesn’t mean that they spend more on IT; in fact, their benchmarks show lower IT spend for IT as a percentage of revenue. I’d be curious as to how they’d measure [output side] - the delivery of IT capability and other outcome/value metrics around the intentions and purposes in the previous paragraph.
What Lynne is also saying about sustaining momentum, is in the words of an executive coach who she worked with, “Give it a name.” As a result Lynne raises the visibility of the innovations at DTE – she itemizes them, attaches a value, and publicizes them. This amounts to an internal PR campaign. Keeping them a secret would diminish the momentum of their innovation culture. IT gets credit. I would imagine this fosters pride in their work. In so many organizations where problems always get the attention, morale suffers.
It’s interesting that Lynne says that another way to overcome stagnation is to rotate team members through different tasks. This focuses employees on new problems, encourages them to learn about new domains, and connecting with new co-workers. As an example, she was even asked to handle food service selection for cafeterias on the DTE campus. She wasn’t experienced at all in that, but the experience was valuable for her. Teams staying stuck in one class of work can lead to stagnation and a loss of innovative energy.
Barriers to innovation: statements like “We’ve always done it this way.” She says you should consider whether this ends the conversation, or starts the conversation.
A point that jumps off of one of Lynne’s slides: An innovative, collaborative culture leverages the strengths of a diverse talent pool. I think about Richard Florida’s expression of this idea on a macro-level when he describes the strength of the U.S. as having been a talent magnet for creative people from around the world to live and work. Lynne uses the example of the diverse skills of the Cutter Consortium as also being a model of innovation. It’s a talent pool that clients draw upon by gaining access to thought leadership by people at the top of their game in their respective areas of expertise. [This conference certainly has embodied that concept when I think about the speakers, the panelists, and finally, the members of the audience.]
Posted by Mike at May 3, 2007 3:59 PM
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