To foster innovative thinking inside the Philadelphia Archdiocese's IT department, Fruehwald encourages all of his staffers to bring forth ideas, suggestions and recommendations, which are then considered and hashed out. "Oftentimes, we ignore the folks in the trenches who we rely on for the day-to-day operations, [but] their ideas and suggestions are as valuable as those of management," he said.

Fruehwald noted, though, that the process isn't limited to IT itself. By witnessing how end users worked, IT staffers learned that some were entering data into spreadsheets they kept for themselves, while others were writing information on paper and then filing the papers into three-ring binders. None of the data was available on an organizationwide basis, nor was it easily usable or searchable by other people who needed it, Fruehwald said.

The observations led to the deployment of client management software from Harmony Information Systems Inc. in Reston, Va., via a phased rollout that was completed last year. Fruehwald said the Harmony software stores data in a single repository that all the end users can access--something they could barely imagine doing before.

Todd Norrgard, director of IT at Watertown, N.Y.-based Car-Freshner Corp., agreed that IT innovation is only important if it increases business efficiency. "We've been told not to sell IT--just recommend solutions for known problems," he said. "There's got to be a tangible payback, or innovation isn't a sufficient business case for implementing something new."

The air-freshener maker's approach comes from lessons learned over the years, according to Norrgard. "In the past, IT has attempted to drive innovation by providing new technology to users, even when there hasn't been an identified problem," he said. "However, the result has been that our users tend to lose focus on what they've been hired to do. They do IT, instead of using IT to augment their daily business tasks."