October 20188 What is this jumble of buzzwords? Proliferative innovation is one of the CIO's key roles - enabling business innovation via a proliferation of new business systems. Platform+Agile 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 PROLIFERATIVE INNOVATION VIA PLATFORM+AGILEBY DR. STEVE HODGKINSON, CIO, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICESIN MY V EW
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