So I get excited to see an IBM sponsored publication titled "Innovations" from the good folks who also publish Baseline and CIO Insight among other magazines. Fodder for the New Florence innovation blog, I think.
I drill into an article about "Top 10 projects for 2007". But it lists Financial Reporting, Server Upgrades, Disaster Planning/Recovery, CRM. I double check to make sure the list is not from 1997. I hope to find some exciting new data mining for financial forensics or some neat mobile sales tool. Nope.
Then I see a long article on security - along with compliance, often a killer of innovation projects. But I at least expect to see innovations in security given amazing innovation the bad guys are showing in compromising security and data privacy. But I see lots of references to SOX, and September 11.
A search of the whole issue does not show a single mention of "wiki", "virtualization", "telepresence", "SaaS", "autonomic" ,"biometrics", "telemetry" anywhere - some of the hottest concepts in IT today.
I am not picking on the magazine. They do not dream stuff up. It reflects what the market is doing - and it seems like mundane, low-payback projects are being spray painted as innovation. Kinda like the phenomenon of "greenwashing" - "inaccurate, inappropriate or unsubstantiated" environmental marketing claims.
To me, it is demeaning to CIOs who are truly delivering innovation MAGIC to put such IT projects/initiatives in the same bucket.
