As Donald Trump’s quest for the Republican presidential nomination in the United States stumbles from one controversy to the next, one has to wonder what pearls of wisdom he is saving for when things really start to heat up.
Having already managed to alienate the country’s entire Latino population, it was the turn of the nation’s women last week. But just as a broken clock is right twice a day, Trump occasionally manages to speak some sense. “Watch, listen, and learn. You can’t possibly know it all yourself,” he once said, presumably during one of his more lucid moments. And you know what, he’s absolutely right.
In the truest sense of the entrepreneurial spirit, we should never stop striving for more knowledge and more information, because we can never have enough of either. And sometimes, the inspiration we crave for that long-awaited breakthrough can come from the unlikeliest of sources.
Take, for example, the IT leaders of large, well-established businesses. What could these incredibly knowledgeable masters of enterprise tech possibly learn from the philosophies espoused by the sort of lean start-ups that most likely began life in the corner of a teenager’s bedroom? Well, quite a lot as it turns out.
You see, the key tenets that are embraced by lean start-ups enable them to identify business problems, quickly prototype solutions that are tested with prospective customers or users, learn from the testing, and refine the solution or shift to a new one. And if you were to sit down with a group of CIOs and ask them to describe the purpose of what they do for a living, they’d struggle to come up with a more accurate definition than that.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Eric Ries coined the concept of the ‘lean start-up’ in his 2011 book of the same name, and while the methodologies he describes were originally designed for entrepreneurs in start-up companies, many of them are also applicable to much larger organisations. For example, Ries defines an entrepreneur as anyone who creates new products and services in the face of uncertainty, but this equally applies to the role of the CIO. He also defines start-ups as organisations that are looking for problems to solve and business models that make their solutions viable; again, that sounds eerily familiar.
The similarities don’t end there either. Indeed, IT departments and start-ups share a wide range of near-identical challenges: they are both expected to deliver rapid results and a clear path to success; the talent and resources they require are often scarce; the business environments they operate in are extremely volatile; and the customers they deal with are fickle and prone to variable needs. And there’s more: both must deliver products or solutions that solve real problems and provide value or they will ultimately not be adopted and used.
Having harvested the low-hanging fruit of cost reduction and operational efficiencies, CIOs are now challenged with tackling new types of endeavours using emerging technologies to drive internal collaboration and innovation and propel revenue generation and growth for their businesses. Achieving success with these initiatives requires picking the right problems to solve and creating solutions that will not only be embraced but also deliver significant business value. Success requires CIOs to employ different ways of thinking and managing such initiatives — and the shared challenges faced by large IT departments and lean start-ups may just hold the key.
So what lessons can CIOs learn from the start-up community? First and foremost, they must move beyond the idea of being a mere service provider or business partner and fully embrace the role of entrepreneur, proactively seeking out business opportunities such as new products and revenue streams that will drive growth and improve competitiveness.
CIOs must begin thinking like start-ups, moving away from the idea that simply getting the job done is good enough and focusing more clearly on the nuances of customer acceptance, adoption, and delivery of business value.
The CIO must also look to create and retain customers, because the widespread availability of third-party apps and solutions — coupled with growing line-of-business influence — means the IT user base is no longer a captive audience. An entrepreneurial IT department is one that is continuously thinking about attracting, engaging, and “selling” solutions and services to its customers, because if they don’t, there are plenty of others willing to step into the breach.
Ultimately, whether they are internal or external, customers have a job to do and want to hire a solution that helps them to get it done. And in the role of entrepreneur, the CIO’s job is to find the solution that his or her customers want to hire. That might sound as though it’s easier said than done, but if you’re always watching, always listening, and always learning, you might just find the answer you’re looking for in the most unexpected of places.
The columnist is group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC.
