Management

Want to Boost Tech Innovation at Your Job? Get Passionate

Research shows that people passionate and excited about their work are more likely to exploit opportunities.

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

Working in IT at a small to midsized organization is like working at the intersection of “D’oh!” and “Aha!”

One minute, the dev team down the hall is asking whether your shop can keep a customer app that they created running at peak volumes for 24 hours every Friday.

A few minutes later, you find yourself sitting next to a new employee explaining how to get on email remotely.

Then, 10 minutes after that, you’re presenting to senior managers about how the company can drive down costs by moving its data archives to the cloud.

That’s the life of IT teams today. These are not jobs for the faint of heart. It’s also why companies that are successful often have tech teams led by people who bring their passion with them to work every day.

Translating Passion into Profits for Your Business

Research shows the intriguing connection between passion and innovation. Dean A. Shepherd, a professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, has found that passion leads people to take risks that they might otherwise not.

“A high level of harmonious passion for work significantly increases the likelihood of innovation managers to pursue new product development opportunities,” noted Shepherd in his book, Decision Making in Entrepreneurship.

What’s fascinating about this research is that it showed that excitement — often from factors outside work — when paired with passion for the job really drove up the potential for people to exploit opportunities.

We can all learn from that: Bring your passions to your job, and let your excitement bear fruit. It’s more critical now than ever because IT teams aren’t just asked to configure networks, set up email accounts and back up data (though they do a lot of that too).

In BizTech, we strive to shine a light on the passionate IT people in business. We hope that their stories — like those about the SETI Institute using data analytics to search for life beyond planet Earth or the Houston Astros relying on that most stalwart of technology, uninterruptible power supplies, to ensure no fan is left in the dark — are catalysts for your own IT passion pursuits.

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