Inovation vrs on-going business is a problem far beyond IT. It is one of the reasons that so many consumer goods fail in generating new products. 3-M is a company that seems to have overcome and are able to continually generate new products.

In the gloablised 21st Century, all the corporations are operating in a "control-oriented" mode where maximizing the share-holder value attracts top-most priority. In such an organization, it is the finance execs who call the shots and who decide how the business should be run. And finance execs are focused on the top-line and the bottom line and don't care much about what comes between these two lines. Least of all on how customers' interests are best served.

The second factor at play is, organisations are structured in such a way that the management execs spend as little time per SBU that they possibly can afford to and still, exert as much control as they can. Such an approach will not work with an "innovation-centric" business model where the exec will have to learn the nuances of the individual businesses (this will maximize the time he spends in a business).

So, in a nutshell, large organizations are by design set-up for failure on the innovation front.

For the last four years I have worked as local support for a company that has a central IT. In that time I have been allowed to do less and less, at this point I can't even restore a file from a backup or change a user's password. The old timers tell me that it is all a pendulum and shortly it will start to swing back the other way. In the mean time central IT has not added staff so they are now less responsive than ever. A file restore could take days as opposed to the minutes it took when I was able to do the work myself. All in all it is very frustrating. When I finally get up the courage to leave I will keep that in mind as I look for other opportunities.

I also work in a company that is making it very difficult for the IT staff to get anything done. The problem is not that management has determined that this is the best way to run an IT organization. The problem is with Sarbanes-Oxley and the resulting audits. We don't have any choice but to put many controls and approvals in place. We need to maintain strict segregation of duties. Management would rather not run this way, and in non-SOX areas, things are not as bad. The problem in our organization is that all systems that have anything to do with a financial system need to conform to our auditor's definition of SOX compliance. This covers a fairly wide range of systems. Until the definition of SOX compliance changes to something more oriented toward productivity and less control and approval based, IT organizations in public companies will not be allowed to do anything other than tightly control major parts of its systems and infrastructure.