Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

The keynote speaker is Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of InfoSys, talking about the future of IT and innovation. He is stating that employee focus and IT focus is necessary for innovation, and must funded by efficiencies in operational processes. The 7 game changing trends of IT led innovation are:

1. Simplification of complex business systems. Simplifying organizational complexity reduces business risks, frees up cash.
2. Architecting an adaptive organization: Integrating processes, systems and metrics.
3. Moving from value chains to value webs. The concept of existing in a discrete linear fashion, known as value chains, worked previously. In an economy of ideas, thoughts, info, ideas need to flow back and forth, up and down, sideways, etc. creating a value web. He stated that innovation can come through co-creation with customers.
4. Smarter Organization: Better learning through collaboration and personalization. It ensures faster, better, cheaper adoption and utilization of systems.
5. IT led innovation in healthcare: universal electronic healthcare records, creating personalized healthcare and medicines, software intensive medical device networks.
6. IT led innovation for better banking: banking the unbanked (e.g. rural areas of India). He’s mentioning branchless, internet based banks, including some in India run by InfoSys. Next item is digital cash.
7. Strategic partnering as your innovation weapon. It allows innovation to have a variable cost model, scaling with demand.