Regardless of the innovation strategy your organization has adopted, and no matter what kind of innovations you have decided to pursue, you will almost always have to deal with information technology professionals at some time during the process.

Information technology is now a central and critical driver of production in almost all industries, from those which are dominated by industrial age economics to the emerging innovation economy companies that are taking the lead now.

As a result, information technology can be considered either a necessary evil that prevents things getting done or, alternatively, a massive enabler of competitive advantage and worker productivity. Perspectives vary depending on the way an IT organization deals with change on a day to day basis.

No matter the perception of the information technology group, there is a key thing that those responsible for innovation will find very hard to avoid: the extreme emphasis that most IT professionals place on minimizing change. There are excellent reasons they do this, though it presents significant difficulties for innovators, whose whole role is to create valuable, productive change.

IT organizations will probably go so far as to have change teams, the purpose of which is to make it as hard as possible to change anything. They rationalize this with throw away lines such as “protecting service” and “up-time management”, and for those times when change is unavoidable, they ensure there are any number of gates and governance processes designed to make things as difficult as possible. As difficult as possible, at least for the innovators.

For most innovation teams, rigorous focus on the disciplines of innovation management are a positive way to manage IT folk in an organization. Innovation management provides tools and processes that are helpful in demonstrating the value of change to technologists, and enable the team to show that such change is in the best interests of the organization as well as IT.