sitic Topic Forum on Innovation

Wednesday, November 24, 2004 from 13:00 until 18:00, ETH Zentrum

Introduction

ETH World hosts on November 24, 2004 a Topic of the Swiss IT Intelligence Community sitic. sitic is a vendor-independent peer-to-peer network. sitic fosters the exchange of ideas and experience among IT departments of large Swiss companies.

sitic wants to

• help to access information which is not provided by formal information suppliers
• improve its member's practical IT knowledge by stimulating peer-to-peer sharing of experience, ideas, best practices and information
• actively sustain networking and trust-building among the Swiss corporate IT community
• support joint evaluations of best practices and benchmarks
• carry out joint IT intelligence activities
• help Switzerland-based IT organizations deliver better value to their businesses

More information about sitic can be found at http://www.sitic.ch.

Motivation

A look at the technology hype cycle for IT shows a variety of concurring technologies. For one technology that reached the plateau of productivity many others seem to be ready to take its place.

The difficulty for IT architects and managers is to select at the right time the right technology and to introduce it into the company. At the same time older technologies have to be phased out.

This Topic Forum is dedicated on how to master IT innovation in an enterprise: What is innovation? How to achieve it? How to promote it?

Innovation Process

• What could be the criteria to assess new technologies?
• Assessment of patents
• Which are the preconditions in our organization to adopt new technologies?
• Which are the success factors to introduce a new technology?
• How to promote new technologies to management, employees and customers?

Technology Portfolio Management

• When to introduce a new technology? When to phase out an old technology?
• How many similar technologies should be supported at the same time?
• Dependency on suppliers
• Disruptive technologies; technology brokers; effects of innovation on system's life cycles