December 20178 In MY ViewBY DR. STEVE HODGKINSON, CIO, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIAWhat is this jumble of buzzwords? Prolif-erative innovation is one of the CIO's key roles - enabling busi-ness innovation via a proliferation of new business systems. Platform+Ag-ile is the means to do it.In times gone by the CIO's 'ICT Strategy 101' mantra was to centralise/standardise/rationalise to create a Standard Operating Environment (SOE). Fewer moving parts equals a safer, less costly, more integrated enterprise ICT environment. Shared services are a good illustration of this logic. 'Less is more' - you can have any colour as long as it is black. Innovation, however, requires new things ... a proliferation of new solutions that create points of differentiation. More is more. Users expect more ... and faster.The CIO, as usual, is caught in an integration vs. differentiation dilemma. Integration is necessary to enable enterprise-wide information sharing and seamless business processes (and can itself be a source of differentiation and competitive advantage). Integration, however, takes time, focus and discipline. Individual business units can't always wait for the integrated enterprise solution and sometimes pursue strategies to differentiate through local innovations, creating fragmentation and a proliferative sprawl of new business systems. (Sigh!).The rise of the as-a-service economy enabled by cloud computing is fuelling this proliferation, with business units able to implement new software as a service applications with increasing ease and speed.It turns out, however, that the biggest innovation of all is to work out how to embrace proliferation ... run with it ... harness it ... manage it in real time to enable differentiation ... rather than trying to stomp it out in the name of integration. Innovation, after all, is why we are here. I use the term Proliferative Innovation to explain that an enterprise's innovation agenda must be founded on embracing a proliferation of technologies, rather than seeking to constrain technology choices to those that are convenient for the ICT department. Business executives are increasingly choosing technologies that are convenient for them.But how can a CIO balance the apparently conflicting imperatives to get onto the front foot with proliferative innovation? The answer is to think bigger than your own enterprise. The cause of the problem is also its solution. Cloud services.A cloud service like Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, or Salesforce, is a massive centralised global shared service platform. These cloud services have effectively created ubiquitous global SOEs that transcend individual enterprises. The SOE platform is no longer in the hands of the CIO. The ICT departments of even the Proliferative Innovation via Platform+Agile
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