Are you silently adhering to the old-fashioned IT models to keep your enterprise running in the short term, or are you innovating your IT environment to help your enterprise in the long term.

In the Jan/Feb 2009 From the Inside, I talked about "innovate or die", and in the Mar/Apr 2009, I talked about how much the economy sucks and the opportunities that exist.

Recessions have a way of pushing for innovations within business and business practices. The old-fashioned, tried and true, models and methods aren't working as well now, so companies are starting to look for new ways to draw in customers and decrease expenses.

Businesses continue to struggle over getting the mid-market customer that had sustained them for the last several years. The CEO and CFO, as well as sales departments, are starting to look at the value market and the premium markets. Data, reporting, and accessibility to this information is key to finding these markets that the company had previously treated as the forgotten step child.

It may take some innovation to produce the data, or to provide the information needed to combine geographic location, sales data, and customer profiles.

If your CEO asked you how you can provide accessible data like this, or provide some other innovation, what type of idea will you deliver? Are you able to provide high-speed experiments, or will you have to tell your CEO it will take 18-24 months before you could do anything?

Do you know how to fully use all the tools you already have? Do you know what tools exist that would solve your problems or make your job easier? Are you able to tap data from outside your enterprise to enhance the presentation, add accuracy, and provide more data? Are you able to provide outside systems easy access to the data you have accumulated over the last 30 years?

Web services, APIs, graphical reports, data accessibility tools, and mining and warehousing tools are important now, but what will your business ask of you next? Can you connect to Facebook, Twitter, or Windows Live and Sharepoint? Can Salesforce.com access your customer data information? What automation do you have within your systems? What automation is missing? If you can't answer these questions, the International Spectrum 2010 conference is coming up April 12-15, 2010. You can get them answered there, as well as get the tools that will facilitate the innovation your CEO is going to require of you.

If you can't wait until then, take look at the webinars available, or talk with someone at your local user group or a consultant. There is a lot more you can do for your business's ROI than you may think.