The cultural challenge of innovation
Many organisations miss out on potential innovation as a direct result of how they manage their business-critical applications and digital platforms. There is an approach to streamlining your operations that can free up budget and capacity and ensure your digital investments create business value at the same time. You’ll enable the business not just to run ‘as usual’, but also to build a foundation for continuous innovation.
Generally speaking, IT teams spend 60-80% of their time and focus in the area of operations. It’s a necessity, so it gets the major share of their attention. Robust and reliable operations are the backbone of running any business effectively and efficiently. The problem is, the allocation of so much focus to operations puts a squeeze on investment needed for innovation. The business accommodates the operations requirement but this leads to innovation being addressed in fits and starts. Fresh initiatives become landmark events, rather than regular catalysts of continuous forward momentum.
Our aim at Columbus, with every customer, is to help find ways of freeing up time from operations to enable more focus on driving the business forward. It’s not something that is instantly achieved, but rather a goal we work on together over time. We explore the pain points and look to develop alternative processes that will reduce effort and create more room for innovation.
Making the most of your partnership with a managed service provider
Something else to bear in mind is that it can seem that operations professionals live in a negative world. They face a non-stop flow of problems; reacting, fixing, advising users. This can make it difficult to shift attention elsewhere. Yet within your partnership with managed service providers, there is an opportunity to go beyond this reactive model. It involves bringing in a mix of skills, combining the pressing tasks of running the systems, together with improving and evolving them. This is the route to unlocking more value. Without this broader approach, the innovation potential within operations ends up dormant, on-hold until some unspecified time in the future.
Another cause of delayed innovation is the rapid pace of technology development and an organisation’s ability to adapt to it, often lacking the agility that new technologies make possible.
Many operational models were developed for technology environments that have undergone huge change. The days of stable and unthreatened systems, and infrequent software releases and updates, are behind us. The days of treating projects and innovation as distinct entities from operations are also behind us. In today’s cloud-first world, platforms evolve continuously. Releases are frequent. Business change does not wait for long project cycles. That’s why operations today must support innovation while keeping the platform stable, secure, and predictable. Most operational setups were never designed to do both.
Automation and AI are also key agility enablers for realising business value faster. Our recent article, Creating incremental business value through AI, outlines further insights on this topic. More and more value comes from small, incremental improvements, such as targeted automation or focused technology enhancements. A practical approach is to identify or create space for these smaller, ongoing initiatives through regular discussions with your managed services provider.
Operations are the foundation of value creation
Modern operations should be about creating the conditions where value can be realised repeatedly. When operations are designed correctly, they enable organisations to meet this challenge of ‘multi-tasking’. Innovation and business as usual can run along parallel timelines, neither being diluted at the expense of the other:
- Cost control through predictability and automation
- Risk reduction through governance, testing, and monitoring
- Continuous improvement through controlled change and release management
- Structured innovation built in the organisation’s culture
Without stable operations, innovation remains theoretical. Without innovation and constant value creation out of existing technology, operations become an overhead. The two are inseparable. The mindset shift that leaders must make is from managing operations as a cost, to building and realigning them as a value lever.
The three-phase approach to a secure, adaptable, evolving digital platform
The opportunity to drive down costs can be realised both through automation, and through proactive monitoring, to take mastery over operations, stabilising and optimising them. Savings made through these practices, brought into operations through lean delivery, can be reinvested into activities that move your business forward.
The approach we introduce customers to at Columbus helps them to get both their operations and their plans for innovation in the perspective they need to be in, prepared and aligned for progress in parallel with each other. This is where operations become a strategic enabler, playing a central role in innovation and bringing it into the company culture.
There are three phases to our approach:
1) Run & support
Application managed services (AMS) teams should take care of proactive risk, incident, and vulnerability management. Their primary role is to ensure stability, security, performance, and business continuity for your critical digital platform. This gives your own team the breathing space to look to the future rather than constantly battling with the challenges of the present. Clear KPIs should be defined and tracked with your partner to make progress visible, for example through lower application run costs and fewer incidents.
2) Grow & adapt
Make it easier for your business to adapt to market changes, competitive initiatives, and emerging opportunities. It’s essential to keep your solution resilient, up to date with new compliance and regulatory requirements, and on top of cloud updates. We help you deal with such challenges with zero disruption to the business and minimal involvement from your team. They then gain back the time they need to help move the business forward.
The KPIs you should be able to track here include faster time-to-market for new features and a high change success rate.
3) Innovate
To help you realise more value from your existing platform, your technology should be continuously aligned with evolving business goals. Your success depends on combining the right mix of operational and advisory capabilities. Both should be grounded in an understanding of industry challenges and business processes, able to apply technology in a practical way. In this case, the KPIs you should be able to track include increased IT capacity, for example through offloading non-core operations.
Innovation is the new business as usual
In many of my conversations with customers we find that they are only two-thirds of the way through the three phases, not yet as fully embarked on the innovation phase. The three phases don’t run independently from each other, but are designed to work in harmony. The implication of that is that innovation becomes continuous. It’s no longer a major event but an approach a company integrates into its culture.
We can embed continuous improvement and innovation in service agreements through regular collaboration and structured reviews. This promise comes to life in innovation workshops where teams work to identify and prioritise improvements that align with your strategic goals. Working as one team, we help you define clear transformation targets such as cost reduction, automation, and real-time visibility of your data to drive insights that, themselves, help drive innovation. Most importantly, we make sure to validate the ability of every initiative to deliver measurable business impact.
This is where the role of a partner becomes of strategic importance. A well-selected partner will help to maintain focus on improvement and ensuring that innovation remains part of the agenda. At the same time, innovation cannot be fully outsourced. Its success depends on a shared commitment, with the organisation dedicating time and resources, and the partner providing structure, continuity, and technical support to move initiatives forward.
The value of such partnerships comes from combining internal ownership with external guidance. It’s an approach that makes it easier to translate ideas into practical actions aligned with business priorities and technology capabilities. Without this balance, innovation can remain conceptual rather than becoming a consistent driver of progress.
Ensuring a partner you can trust
Many offerings exist. They range from the systems integrator technology-biased organisation, to the high-level consultaerncy that might have the right ideas, but will have to call in yet another company when it comes to the technical aspect of making them happen.
Columbus straddles every discipline, from the strategic to the technical. Our added ingredient is first-hand industry experience across manufacturing, retail and distribution, life science, and food and beverage. As individuals, a high proportion of our consultants have worked in these industries. As a team, this experience gives us a broad base of knowledge around benchmarked practices and typical use cases.
We can help you address the operations cost issue through application managed services. Rather than just a resource that the business falls back on when it has to, we can help you turn your operations into an ideas engine, a strategic enabler rather than a drain on finances. At Columbus, our goal is to bring the achievement of your goals ever closer to realisation.
If you want to hear more about how we might be able to help you streamline your operations, and find the time, space, and funds to look more to the future than you might be doing now, feel free to contact Frederik Thordal.
