Empowering Innovation

Empowering Innovation (or known as disruptive innovation) is the type of innovation that offers new and high paying jobs in IT. Empower innovation transforms complex and costly services into fewer and cheaper products.

The diagram at left shows the three waves of computing sense 1950, first with the Mainframe, then the mini-computer, and lastly the PC. Each wave expanded the market and number of users. The first and second waves saw everyone except IBM leave the market. Within seven years after the introduction of the IBM PC, Digital Equipment and the rest of the min-computer market vanished. The exception was the AS-400 series from IBM.

What is unique about computers is their ability to create secondary empowering innovations. The larger the user base the larger the number of secondary empowering innovations. Now this is not always true for all industries, Pampers killed diaper services, but did not spawn multiple secondary disruptive innovations. IT is unique with interdependencies between manufacturers to offer the users custom solutions.

The PC and Microsoft are a good example of interdependent empowering innovation:

• MS-DOS created WordPerfect, Lotus-123, Dbase, Harvard Graphics.
• Windows 3.1 and they were gone, and on came Microsoft Office and GUI applications with a more intuitive user interface.
• Windows XP again more disruption in the PC ecosystem, ending Novel, Banyan, and others in the server network community.
• Microsoft Windows 7 or 8? I have a hard time thinking of major changes in the PC software ecosystem. That should be the signal that the changes in Microsoft are no longer having the positive job employment impact of previous releases.

Replacing old models with new models. Professor Christensen says that sustaining innovations tend to be a zero sum game. One example is Windows 7 and 8 showing that Microsoft moved from a disruptive empowering innovation to a sustaining innovation. For the IT professional this means that Windows 7 and 8 are no longer an employment engine like previous major releases.

The chart at left shows the various major releases of an IT service or application. Like Microsoft, Cisco had a very large impact with the 2500 series router and created a number of secondary disruptive innovations. With the Cisco 2600 series even more disruption in the router market. With the 2800 series and now 2900 series the transition from empower to sustaining innovation is complete.

The risk with sustaining innovation is that it leads to cost reductions, efficiencies to reduce the cost of manufacturing, deployment costs, and operational costs.

This leads to the third type of innovation; efficiency innovation, and where you lose your job.

Efficiency Innovation

The word efficiency explains the theory. Innovation that reduces costs of the manufacturing, distribution, and operation of the product. To drive new sales offering the user with a lower cost of operation is a key selling point, not productivity increases. Therefore, the savings are not necessarily in the cost of the product to the user but the savings are in the lower operating costs for the end user.

At the same time to increase earning as the manufacturer, efficiencies are wrung out of the production cycle. The client sees a lower cost of ownership, and the manufacturer sees a lower cost of production.

The lower cost of operation is not bad for the IT professional if the manufacturer and buying company use the savings to build and buy new disruptive empowering innovations. In the past, this was very true. You had to have a PC, you had to have a 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, and on and on with each machine upgrade performance and productivity improved. So work was steady and rewarding.

So what changed?

Professor Christensen proposed what changed was the way companies, specifically public companies use efficiencies to reward the shareholders and not reinvest the efficiencies back into the business.

The impact has been that IT professionals are looking at pay cuts, and layoffs in greater and greater numbers.

Christensen explains:

"The answer is that efficiency innovations are liberating capital, and in the United States this capital is being reinvested into still more efficiency innovations, creating a cycle of continuing efficiency not expanding disruptive empowering innovation that creates jobs. America is generating many fewer empowering innovations than in the past. We need to reset the balance between empowering and efficiency innovations."

So what to do?

Review your current situation and list each item that you support as either Empowering, Sustaining, or Efficiency. Then when you add up your day, if you're moving more and more to Efficiency, you need to be thinking about being the last to leave the ship or the first to jump.

But jump to what and where?

The answer is to a company that sees the IT services being deployed as a required sustaining innovation, (medium pay) or disruptive empowering innovation, (higher pay).

Another solution is look to have certifications that are empowering innovation solutions. Be on the giving end of the Innovation cycle. It might be VMware, HyperV, Palo Alto, Cisco Nexus, it only matters that your IT knowledge is based on disruptive empowering innovations.

George C. Morton, Ph. D. Dual CCIE 18532

I have now spent most of my life in networking with multiple degrees and a dual CCIE to help secure my business career. Over the last thirty plus years, I have seen my income and quality of life continue to go up and up.

However, for the first time I have started to question the trajectory of my career.

Specifically the number of opportunities and increasing income potential are diminishing, in other words, things are not looking as good as they use to. So I wrote this blog story in a way to answer the question for myself.

What has changed in IT and how do I get back in front of the Innovation curve.

In the near future, I'll be writing three or four blog stories as a guest blogger on bradreesecom.

• Part-I, this blog today outlines the general problem in IT going forward and how to find the opportunities to advance your career.
• Part-II, networking specifically and is called WAN-II.
• Part-III covers Cisco and other incumbent equipment and integrator IT companies.
• There might be a Part-IV as an example of disruptive innovation in IT and how it applies to your career if you are in networking IT.

More CCIE Water Cooler Gossip.

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