Noting Chris has been posting on innovation & techie musings at his blog I thought as a change from strategic debate one might observe some tactics that are going on and share these with you...

I just got finished reading an article on a company that has inspired this post.  Krugle has built a product delivering a service using open source technologies - they're in the search business and while competing to some extent with Google they've gone niche and evolved search for a particular community: software developers!

So I'll share my thoughts on why this should help with chasing innovation and hope you'll consider adding this approach to your arsenal of tools.  Please be patient while I elaborate further...

There's some superb rumblings going on / taking place in the software industry right now and of note we had another tremor occur recently when Integration As A service (IaaS) appeared.  This is all part of the wave of innovation in software delivery that has been influenced by middleware, web services (once people got what they were and realised REST was just as useful!), service oriented architecture (SOA) underpinned by Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architectures.

While externally the IT community is doing great evolving software best practice inside corporate IT departments the adoption of these architectures has varied and some are still going through partial adoption cycles while they attempt to adopt these practices with minimum disruption to the organisation.

So why is using something like Krugle going to make a difference - simply I can recall one conversation with an IT manager at a bank where he told me that after installing the new wiki, at zero cost, he had more documentation in 3 months than in the past 3 years - quite an improvement in best practices! 

Krugle will help IT managers / directors wade through the maze of code that has been implemented by so many different developers as departments have gone through constant change via temporary staff, outside services such as consultancies and the up/down sizing that has taken place from internal and external M&A.  If you're an IT director at a bank perhaps one of the questions you've kept asking yourself as the board pushes for you to come up with some strategic ideas to increase revenue is 'what, comprehensively, are my organisation's intellectual assets so that I may bring their value to bear upon achieving my goals'.

Indexing the entire process ecosystem and being able to then identify what is similar, what is different, what exists, what is missing will help the adoption of new best practices in IT service management - the complexity of quantity and variety will be reduced and the ability to architect a "fit for purpose and use" approach to service delivery on software will become a reality.

Bottom line is through deployment of knowledge support services such as  Krugle you will remove existing constraints on collaboration and vision.  This can then be translated into achieving lower costs, increased agility and provide you with the means to examine your ecosystem holistically and then, finally at this point you can start to enjoy some revelations as new insights gleaned from knowledge support system meta data helps provide the arguments for new developments & initiatives thus fuelling strategic thinking and innovation in your organisation.

If you think this is a bit excessive perhaps this article will inspire as well.