Finally, Share the Risk
Innovation carries risk. The bigger the change, the bigger the risk. For Behen, the biggest risk with Washtenaw's wireless initiative was the very scary one that it just wouldn't work. The county wanted to lead the effort, but just because it was out front didn't mean it had to go it alone.
The key was getting others involved, including the University of Michigan, which put its own people on the project. "If you're going to do something this extensive, with multiple stakeholders, you not only need to get buy-in, you need to get them to put forward some kind of resources," says Behen.
Washtenaw is on track to cover the county by early 2008. It will help bridge the digital divide that separates big government and small towns in the area, and will result in further business innovation. "We've talked to top-seven automakers, hospitals, software companies," says Behen. "They've all got plans spinning off of this."
Pitt Ohio's Sullivan is always concerned about the risk of IT-driven initiatives. "I'm leery of innovating from the IT side," he says. "You have to bring the business along." His mobile computing project started out with plans to pilot the systems in the company's Pittsburgh terminal. Sullivan built a cross-functional business team to get to proof of concept and worked with terminal employees to refine the system. Within the first year, drivers and dispatchers were so happy with the system that they asked to keep it even if it didn't go enterprise-wide.
Meanwhile, project leaders discovered that customers wanted the new capabilities . . . yesterday. And not just in Pittsburgh. Other departments, from safety to vehicle maintenance to finance, indicated more could be gained if the PeopleNet application were integrated with other core systems. What began as an exploration into how one off-the-shelf product could be applied to existing business processes turned into a transformational integration project. And the time frame for the mobile implementation shrank from 18 months to less than six. "There was tremendous risk in that," says Sullivan. "Logistically it seemed impossible." But the project had morphed from IT R&D to business necessity.
"It was more than IT with skin in the game," says Sullivan. "The business units wanted to make it successful. That's the key to innovation."
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