Low-risk, incremental improvements aren’t innovation, but that’s where most companies focus, Accenture finds. Innovation is thrilling when it actually happens in a business, but all too often it is the emptiest of buzzwords. Last fall, our annual InformationWeek 500 rankings highlighted IT innovators just like the Gap, UPS, Dish, and residential Depot which have turned great ideas into action using cloud services, data analytics, collaboration tools, and/or mobile apps. It’s no small feat. But these are the exceptions. What’s much more likely is an uninspiring parade of low-risk, incremental improvements. That is the rather dreary conclusion of an Accenture study of greater than 500 executives from companies with greater than $100 million of annual revenue. [An inflexible IT strategy could break what you are promoting. Read: IT’s Famous Last Words: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It.] If an organization invests in a disruptive product or business model and the returns are disappointing, the pursuit of “a higher big thing” dries up fast, and so... Read More »

Going far beyond Jeopardy, IBM’s favorite child is rounding up friends to make intelligent apps proliferate, in healthcare and other fields.

Appointment scheduling, imaging apps, or even a competing medical billing service will tap cloud service. Remote Patient Monitoring: 9 Promising Technologies (click image for larger view) Drchrono, the electronic health records cloud service best known for its iPad app, is making its application programming interface freely available, and is likewise introducing a medical “apps store.” To call it an app store is slightly grandiose — it’s really only a listing of compatible apps and cloud services, with accompanying screenshots — but Drchrono says it should vet the apps in keeping with the standard in their technology and their fit with its own services. Philosophically, in any case, the approach mirrors that of the app store for the iPhone and iPad, said Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder of Drchrono. “i believe what Apple did is brilliant. They said anyone can build apps for the iPhone, but we are going to review them.” Developers must fill out an API access request form, but “the API itself, we’ll... Read More »

HP CIO discusses changing the corporate culture, spending more time with customers, and moving to cloud platforms to execute faster. Hewlett-Packard loves to remind people who it does things on a major scale. Its global supply chain? The most important in the world, it says. Its deployments of SAP ERP, Salesforce.com CRM, Workday HR, and Microsoft Lync unified communications software? Also the most important. Its $120 billion in annual revenue? World’s biggest among IT vendors. How about its big-company bureaucracy? You cannot bait HP executives into any planetary references there, though new global CIO Ramon Baez concedes that various company processes before he arrived in August 2012 “were built for slow.” Part of Baez’s job, working with boss John Hinshaw, executive VP of technology & operations, and the remainder of the HP leadership team, is to focus “on making a model that’s more flexible and agile. How will we move on the speed of economic?” Baez said in a large-ranging interview with InformationWeek. After losing... Read More »

Before signing at the dotted line, evaluate these contract provisions. First of a two-part series. You’re about to sign a software contract for a core application. You’ve already done your homework at the software itself: Thoroughly reviewed its current and future capabilities, performed due diligence at the depth and data of the seller and its staff, and checked references and assessed the vendor’s financial stability. Now you are prepared to join up the dotted line. Don’t minimize the significance of this step. Your job — or even the longer term profitability of your organization — may be at the line. Even in the event you implicitly trust the seller you’ve chosen, you’ll little question seek legal assistance, preferably from attorneys acquainted with software program contracts. Still, you need to re-read the contract to make sure you already know all of its clauses. Is the contract straightforward and straightforward to realize? Does it include the entire negotiated or agreed upon issues? [Converting critical systems? Follow these... Read More »