With all the great minds in corporate IT departments, you would think that innovation would be driven from the business world to consumers, but that’s hardly the case. Most people can do a lot more on their laptop in front of their 3D television screen than they can in their cubicle with the company PC.
In his blog on the CIO Dashboard, Chris Curran asks why this is so and, fortunately for us, answers the question himself, along with his co-worker Henry Hwangbo.
Curran cites five reasons: IT has the wrong skill sets; cloud services are perceived as insecure; open source is mistrusted; governance is too restrictive; and prototypes are underappreciated.
He makes some good points, but there are some explanations for each of them. IT may have the wrong skill sets, but many IT departments, particularly in insurance, are also dealing with legacy systems. The Web is considered innovative for some of these older systems.
The next three reasons all fall under the same umbrella: risk management/corporate governance. Whether the cloud or open source are secure or not is irrelevant once someone brings up the issue to the executive committee. Corporate governance is designed to fight innovation and it’s often doing a good job of it.
As for prototypes, I recently asked Cindy Saccocia, the director of insurance industry solutions for Microsoft, about research and development and she said, “Many of our insurance customers view [cloud computing] as a way to shift their IT R&D to critical business initiatives and applications by letting commodity-based services such as e-mail, migrate to the cloud.”
There’s no doubt, though, that many insurers rely on the insurance software community to find new and better ways for carriers to operate. The problem software vendors face, though, is if their solutions are viewed as too extreme they are going to have difficulty selling them.
While I was researching Curran’s post, Matt Josefowicz from Novarica sent out a news release on “cool” technology initiatives his company has discovered and he plans on reporting on some every quarter. He lists five in his first report. Hopefully he’ll keep finding more, but it could be a tall order.