Invite:
Enterprise Architecture Brainstorming: Innovation Zones
Thursday, June 12, 2014
9:00 AM
The HUB 332
On Leap Forward Day, Thursday, June 12th from 9:00 to noon at The HUB, room 332, you can join Jim Phelps, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Strategy and help him brainstorm ideas around creating Innovation Zones here at The UW. We will work to define what “Innovation Zones” mean to us here at UW:
- What is the right size and space for each zone?
- What do we need to standardize to make the zones useful and easy to leverage?
- How can we capture the great ideas that come from these zones?
- We will also define and identify the EA “Bricks” that need to exist for easy innovation (and integration).
- Come help me think about and build out the innovative ideas for supporting innovation at UW.
Innovation Is: What does Innovation mean to you highlights:
Innovation is:
- Personal - thinking about how I change and innovate in my personal thoughts and life
- It is about taking risks, failure
- It needs an outside view - the view of others helps drive innovation
- It is creative, interesting, exciting
- It is enabling users to try new things. Empowering people.
- Constellation of great ideas coming together
- "Ah-ha" moments
- Readiness and openness to change - you have to be willing to do a new thing in a new way
- It is a not-thinking problem - something that happens in quiet time like gardening
- Taking time to think
- Being willing to try something different
- Innovation forces change upon me
- Three types: Breakthrough (big disruptive change), Evolution (shift towards something better), Orthogonal (using something in a new way)
- Picking one of the many possible solutions - finding the one that will catch fire
- Rethinking old things in new ways - trying out new ways
- Creativity
- No-rules, putting out ideas, no fear of failing
- About relationships - understanding people, environment, culture, needs
- Need to apply the idea not just have the idea. Innovation is making the idea take form. Needs resources and support to make it happen.
Innovation Zones: Discussion Points
The Laundry List of Questions Raised. How do we:
- Capture the lessons-learned
- Transfer out of the Innovation Layer into the other layers
- Balance ambition with constraints (resource constraints, political constraints, etc)
- Integrate innovation into the governance
- Build trust with innovators that we will catch their bright ideas and lessons learned and do something with them
- Get Subject Matter Experts to the table?
- Recognize people and their ideas?
- Nurture people and their ideas across the lifecycle of innovation (see the "R vs. K in Innovation" sidebar)
- Support the "K" of innovators in the "R" environment of innovation (really, see the "R vs. K in Innovation" sidebar)
- Find those who (whose work) should enter the innovation zones
- Make the political and other issues clear to the innovators (e.g. That is a really cool idea but it will never fly with Faculty Governance)
- Balance cool ideas with burning issue solutions (e.g. really neat to have vs. really need to have)
Action oriented items:
- Find the different sponsors for each innovation zone
- Develop a program to drive culture change - Its okay to fail just do it quickly
- Develop a framework for Sponsors and Champions to help them develop and manage their zones
- We have to balance work across all the Pace Layers
- Do we need a new language especially around what "pilot" means?
- We need fair cost accounting.
Resources:
- Gartner Publications: “How to Get Started With a Pace-Layered Application Strategy”, Jim Shepherd, 28 March 2011, G00211245
- Gartner Publications: "Accelerating Innovation by Adopting a Pace-Layered Application Strategy", Yvonne Genovese, 09 January 2012, G00230228
- Forrester Research Publications: "Use A Zone Architecture Model To Encourage Business Innovation An Empowered Report: Supporting Business Innovators", Jeff Scott et al, January 13, 2011
- Forrester Research Publications: "Architect For Extreme Uncertainty", Clay Richardson and Brian Hopkins, April 28, 2014