Okay that title is a bit clickbait-y, but bear with me here. Innovating in the enterprise space is a lot like gardening. To succeed at using technology in new and creative ways to address your organization’s unique needs, you need to purchase some supplies (allocate some budget), clear some space (in your project calendar), impose some order (standardize your tools and methodologies and prioritize your efforts), and consistently tend it from planting through harvest (launch through production and support).

And where do thorns and death-copters come into the analogy, you ask? Thorns are the prickly distractions, like PUMs and Tools releases and hardware updates and OS patches and year-ends and quarter-ends and semester rushes and holidays, that make it hard to keep your shop afloat, much less innovating. And when a multi-year SaaS re-platforming project (a “digital transformation”) darkens the sky above your humble attempts to make life better for your users, that is like defending tender tomato sprouts against a swarm of napalm-spewing gunships.

In this session we’ll consider the value of growing and maintaining a culture of innovation for your enterprise systems; shifting gears from reactive, where you only address the shoutiest pain points, to a proactive, “center of excellence” approach that searches out use cases for your tech tool portfolio and consistently grows new solutions. We’ll also discuss how to defend that fragile culture of innovation from the thorns and burning whirly-birds of desolation, but you probably expect that by now.