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Note: Lean Startup author Eric Ries discusses what CIOs and other IT leaders can learn from entrepreneurial companies.
We recently caught up with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, a book full of practical advice on how to apply metrics and scientific methods to startups. Ries maintains that many lean startup principles are also applicable to large enterprises, so we asked him some questions about how to integrate those lessons into large IT shops and the businesses IT serves.
As it turns out, even large enterprises might want to consider hypotheses tests instead of business plans, and the way to hire entrepreneurial employees might simply be to put the ones you have on an island of freedom where they're protected from existing business units. The stakes? Agility--the ability to innovate even while continuing to be responsible for maintenance and operations.
InformationWeek: Which lean startup tactics are most applicable to those who work in enterprise IT?
Ries: There is no such thing as a technique or a tactic that works all of the time, that works for everybody. These methodologies are specific to the context in which they're designed to operate. So when we talk about applying startup ideas in big companies, we don't mean to every part of the big company. We mean to the parts of the big company that are actually startups.
People find that hard to understand at first. It's a little bit of a strange idea, that a startup is not just two guys in a garage. It actually has nothing to do with what kind of garage you're in or what kind of office you're in. It doesn't matter if you eat Ramen noodles or not.
What makes you a startup is that you're trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. So we're in a situation where we're not building something that's not fundamentally the same as what we've built before. It's something new. It's something that serves new customers that we've never served before. It's a new kind of product that's never been built before. It's taking a technology from one market and moving it to another.
So it's something where we face a lot of uncertainty. And the traditional management practices that run...