Is IT innovation important for your organization? If so, the time has come to find a way to create enough slack resources in your IT shop to buy time and brain-cycles for your employees to have the best chance to succeed at it. Sure enough, IT innovation is again a hot topic in corporate boardrooms and IT shops, and we are working hard to do our part to help you navigate it. While this issue of CBR focuses on dynamic IT capabilities, our next issue will be on the emerging topic of open innovation. In short, open innovation is the orchestration of knowledge inflows and outflows designed to speed up and improve a firm's innovation cycle (but, be patient for now, a lot more next issue.)

This month's CBR is particularly important because what we have on our hands may be shaping up as a big crisis that, to be successfully addressed, requires joint efforts from different communities that seldom interact. I am not going to use cheesy terms such as "a perfect storm," but what we can see is, on the one hand, dropping enrollments in computer science degrees and increasingly limited number of mainframe skills being developed in universities; while on the other hand, mainframes continue to run many of the large mission-critical software applications of modern organizations. On the "third hand" (or the underhand as the famous blues song goes) is the lack of awareness and planning for the impending mass retirement of the baby boomers who hold the great majority of mainframe skills and knowledge today.