If innovation is to become the next core competency, it must become a truly collaborative discipline. Isolated R&D departments and ivory tower product strategies, unlinked from the market dynamics and abstracted from the actual capability to deliver, cannot handle the demand for innovations. To match the rising demand for growth, innovations have to become massive, cheap, and sustainable.

It's always painful for consultants to realize that some of their really great ideas don't work out over the long term for their clients, and project management offices (PMOs) seem to be the most recent casualty. PMOs should work, after all. Centralizing support and reporting functions seems logical and efficient, and there are successes -- but just not as many as there are failures.

How many management revolutions have we endured? How many times have we reorganized when a new management team arrived? Have our management structures changed with the times? What's the relationship among activities, policies, and structures?

Much of what we think about is shaped by the metaphors we use to comprehend the world. Way back in 1984, Michael Porter suggested that we had entered an "information revolution," but that viewpoint misses the forest for the trees. Information per se is not the issue. What people are doing with the information and how they are applying IT are more important than the information itself.