'Innovation Is for Everyone': Practical Strategies to Drive Improvement from Estes' CIO

This viewpoint is a guest post created by Todd Florence. Florence is CIO at Estes Express, the largest private freight carrier in North America. He has more than 20 years of experience in technology, developing new products and services, building innovative teams, and delivering improvements for businesses.

Nearly every company wants to be innovative, but innovating is often easier said than done. In fact, a recent surveyof business executives found that only 21% have achieved their innovation goals, despite a near-universal belief that innovation is a primary source of growth.

At Estes Express, where I serve as Chief Information Officer, innovation has helped us become the largest privately held freight transportation company in North America. At our company, we believe that innovation is for everyone and can come from anywhere across the business.

To tap into those ideas, we've developed a focused, disciplined approach to improving our operations. This approach has helped us unlock a range of benefits, from better efficiency, to more satisfied customers, to employees who are more fulfilled. There's no magic formula for innovation, but there are steps you can take to improve your organization's ability to drive meaningful change. Here are five strategies you can use to transform your organization into an engine for innovation.

1. Focus on innovating processes, not just technologies.

Today, innovation is practically synonymous with developing or deploying new technology. However, a good place to start thinking about innovation is to look at what you already have. How can you improve the processes that are already in place? How can you make things easier for employees and remove unnecessary tasks?

At Estes, we innovate by looking for places where friction gets in the way of people doing their jobs efficiently and effectively. For example, I have yet to meet a driver who joined our company to be a data entry clerk, so we've focused on automating and improving the way we collect data. This not only makes us more efficient, but also lets our drivers focus on what they do best-drive.

2. Encourage incremental innovations.

People tend to think of innovation in terms of splashy, big ticket items. It's exciting to launch an iPhone or Tesla, but those are the culmination of millions of smaller decisions over the course of many years.

At Estes, we believe that focusing on doing a little better every day is just as important. When everyone makes small improvements, even in their day-to-day jobs, it can lead to major changes across an organization. Moreover, we've found that innovation is more likely to come from people rolling up their sleeves and doing the work, rather than just sitting around, thinking of ways to change. Real experience leads to real improvements.

3. Empower non-technical teams to innovate.

Because innovation is so closely associated with technology, organizations often make the mistake of leaning too heavily on their IT teams for new ideas. At Estes, however, we encourage non-technical teams to think about new approaches to solving operational problems. In fact, Estes has developed entirely new career paths for field employees-including clerks and other team members working at our terminals-to bring them into technical roles and provide expert support to their peers.

Another way we help everyone innovate is through citizen development programs, where we empower employees in our business groups to develop software. We have guardrails, but giving people the ability to solve their own problems and make their voices heard not only helps organizations make improvements faster, but also helps with employee satisfaction and retention.

4. Spend as much time outside of IT as in it.

It is true that IT teams play a vital role in innovation. New technologies can be a fast path to business transformation, and IT teams are usually the ones charged with deploying new solutions across organizations.

However, keeping a too-narrow focus on technology can actually be detrimental to driving innovation. That's why I think it's important for IT teams, as well as employees across an organization, to spend a significant amount of time outside of their own departments. For example, I spend a lot of my time talking to employees in the field and working with every team across Estes.

When that happens, you can see challenges in new ways and bring together different ideas to find effective solutions. When employees understand the entire business and build bridges with other teams, they have a much better chance of driving real improvements.

5. Innovate around themes, not problems.

When an organization is committed to building a culture of innovation, it can be tempting to invest some resources into a few persistent issues and mark them resolved. However, for lasting innovation, it's better to innovate around particular topics that are important to your business, not specific problems.

For example, at Estes, we have hackathons that are focused on themes, like sustainability, or AI. We tell our teams that events like these are not the time to pick a few items from their backlog and rush to get something done. Instead, the goal is to give employees time to think freely about key issues. Teams will generate more ideas-and think more creatively-when time for innovation is protected.

There's widespread agreementthat innovation will be a primary source of growth in the years to come. However, it's important to remember that innovative organizations are not born, they're made. It's okay to start small, but you should start now. Making the effort to innovate today is the surest way to tap into the full future potential of your organization.

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