Creating culture of IT innovation includes rewarding failure

Computerworld - DALLAS -- David Richter, vice president of Kimberly-Clark's infrastructure solutions group, knows creating a culture of innovation can be messy, but it's still rewarding.

By encouraging his employees to come to him with innovative ideas, and rewarding them whether the ideas succeed or fail, he's been able to increase efficiency, reduce costs and boost morale.

For example, the computers that run the paper products company's mills could take as long as 25 hours to restore after a system failure. His team found a new way to restore them in less than 30 minutes, and it all came from one person's simple idea.

"When you think about these huge machines they run that cost tens of millions of dollars, you don't want them sitting idle," he told an audience at the SNW conference here Wednesday. (Computerworld is a sponsor of the conference.)

When Richter was hired in 2008 by the maker of Kleenex and Huggies, he was tasked with transforming the infrastructure organization. At the time, employee morale was low. There was no innovation because people were afraid if they failed, they'd lose their job.

A couple of years earlier, the company had gone through a massive outsourcing of its infrastructure organization, firing nearly everyone in the group, Richter said. About a year after that, the company restructured again, hiring back almost 200 engineers while continuing to outsource others.

"A lot of trust had been broken. We had very low morale and very low employee engagement," he said. "The infrastructure organization had become siloed. People were in a self-preservation mode."

While the pressure to reduce costs should be enough for any organization to want to be innovative, for Richter and Kimberly-Clark, innovation was the key to leading the technology lifecycle rather than t following it as the company had been doing.

"We're a growing organization. We reach into 80 countries. There is no way my leadership team and I can think of all the things we need to do to innovate around the globe. I'm just not that smart," he said. "We needed a way to have good ideas take root anywhere in the world."

In his more than 30 years in IT, Richter said he's seen three common barriers to innovation, all three of which were present at Kimberly-Clark at the time. The first was cultural resistance to change.

"I've seen many great ideas that didn't go anywhere because the company wouldn't let them do it," he said.

A second barrier is process. "I truly believe process kills innovation," he said. "I'd never come into an organization in my career outside of the government that was as process-bound as [Kimberly-Clark] was."