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Innovation is a priority for many businesses — and with good reason. If an organization lacks creativity and inventiveness, it might suffer at the hands of competitors that find unique and effective ways to address market needs and serve customers. Innovation allows companies to be pioneers and stand out from the competition.

Being innovative takes effort. CEOs and other senior business executives, including the CIO, must help create a “culture of innovation” throughout the organization. In fact, IT executives can help create an innovative culture and take the lead on pioneering projects. IT can be intricately involved in helping create this culture and leading efforts to generate innovation.

If IT executives and their departments are to contribute more innovation, they need to reduce the amount of time they spend maintaining and repairing systems in their IT infrastructure. This will allow them to focus more time on strategic initiatives. One of the best ways organizations can shorten maintenance and repair time is by reducing the complexity of their IT infrastructure.

IT complexity is a huge problem for many organizations. Technology infrastructures and the business applications and operations they support are more complex. For example, many organizations are using multiple database vendors for key business applications, and the number of applications used at enterprises continues to increase. Furthermore, industry research shows that a large number of organizations have redundant or obsolete applications in place, and many have no process for retiring out-of-date software applications.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that many organizations have a distributed computing environment, with hundreds and sometimes thousands of desktop and mobile computers in use at multiple facilities. The growing use of wireless devices and applications creates another layer of complexity.

Some of these developments are positive for business. For example, having applications and data access available to more users in more locations can help organizations better serve customers and improve efficiencies. But having such a complex IT environment can also keep technology executives wrapped up in day-to-day survival mode rather than in planning and implementing innovative projects that can have a major impact on the success of the organization.

Fortunately, IT complexity can be reduced in several ways. One is to use technology such as enterprise application integration products that enable organizations to integrate a variety of systems and applications from different vendors. These products can help create a cohesive environment out of multiple computing platforms.

Organizations can also reduce complexity by increasing their use of automation in data centers and other operations. That can help decrease the number of IT resources needed for ongoing maintenance and allow organizations to redeploy those resources to more-innovative initiatives, such as building new online customer service tools, sales channels and collaboration systems.

Other ways to reduce complexity and slash maintenance time include implementing storage virtualization technology, consolidating server hardware in data centers, and deploying products such as application portfolio and project management software.

Finally, organizations can put in place an IT governance program that helps evaluate and track the progress of technology investments and creates a more disciplined approach to technology implementation.

Having a less complex environment to oversee can give CIOs and other IT executives more time to be innovative.

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