Leader: The business of innovation

An upcoming report from Gartner says IT is becoming a "non-growth industry" as user organisations lose faith in their returns on their tech investments.

This could spell trouble for IT departments, Gartner warned, as more and more businesses begin to view IT as a commodity and turn to outsourcing.

Gartner VP and research fellow Ken McGee told silicon.com: "CIOs have got to devote more energy towards being innovative and taking IT where IT has never been before."

At the same time, we've long heard about the need for IT to be closely aligned with the business in order to bring about appropriate use of technology in the enterprise. And indeed a stereotype persists of a contentious relationship between IT and the business.

But in looking for sources of innovation and inspiration, perhaps the business leaders could be just the people to help out CIOs.

Sometimes it takes someone who is outside of IT's inner circles to come up with the new ideas about how to use tech. Because they don't know the ins and outs of particular technologies, they don't have any preconceived notions about its limits - and thus can dream up novel requests.

It can start with the business asking for the sort of tools or reports that would be most useful to them. It would be a wish list. Nine times out of 10 the requests may be impossible to meet but the one that's not might just inspire the techies to come up with an innovative solution to a problem they could never have dreamt needed solving.

This is different - completely different - to innovation in technology for its own sake but with little practical application.

Gloomy predictions about the decline of the IT department must be taken seriously. But it would be foolish to think CIOs cannot tap relationships, both within their teams and across other teams in the business, that mean the right type of innovation takes place.