When providing technology leadership, don’t push it

One of IT’s important roles in the organization is providing technology leadership.

Start with the well-established SWOT approach to strategic planning (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, although it really should be TOWS).

Technology leadership means taking responsibility for identifying technology-driven threats and opportunities and knowing how to productively bring them to the organization’s attention.

It’s the essence of a CIO’s strategic role. With that in mind, two pieces of advice: (1) consider the Segway, and (2) don’t push it.

Segway lessons

As the Segway was being developed, various professional visionaries, including its inventor, Dean Kamen and Steve Jobs, touted it as an impending civilization-transforming breakthrough.

Civilization, though, remains unbrokenthrough, due, I’m sure, to its failings and not that of the Segway.

Or not. Visionaries see the amazing potential something new and surprising has. It’s what they do; while there are certainly exceptions, for the most part visionaries decide early that if they pursue that potential hard enough they’ll overcome all of the unforeseen barriers to success.

That these barriers were unforeseen was not due to their obscurity: Such right-in-front-of-your-face challenges as curbs, pedestrians, and other forms of motorized traffic that make Segway riding dangerous to both the rider and those being ridden among were really quite difficult to miss. As it were.

No, the unforeseen barriers were unforeseen because few visionaries have any interest in foreseeing them. It isn’t what they do.

Fair enough. But if you want to make a career out of being a visionary, you probably shouldn’t try to do so from your CIO (or even CTO) chair. As a visionary you should write a business plan, sell it to some venture capitalists, and try to make it happen (or at least to build a convincing enough company that you and the venture capitalists can sell it for enough money that you can retire to a life of luxury).

As a CIO, it isn’t enough to see amazing potential. You’re also responsible for foreseeing all of the foreseeable barriers to success. Spotting the barriers is nowhere near as much fun (although you can improve things a bit through the use of “pre-mortem analysis“). But if you don’t engage in barrier-spotting, the barriers will turn up anyway and when they do, the CEO will quite rightfully ask you, “How did you manage to miss this?”

Applying this insight to, say, cloud computing won’t, I trust, be a strain.

Don’t push it

Once you adopt the role of technology-driven threats-and-opportunities spotter, you’ve put yourself and the business you work in in danger. The danger? That you’ll find strategic threats and opportunities where none exist.

Some innovations matter. The personal computer, local area network, and Internet were three that collectively transformed the world of business. CIOs who ignored them, or, even worst, tried to prevent their entry into the enterprise, acted as anti-strategic planners … the business equivalent of Hogan’s Heroes‘ Sergeant Schultz, saying “I see nothink!” over and over again while bad things (from Colonel Klink’s perspective) happened all around him.

But on the other end of the scale were the CIOs who, when Accenture (to pick an easy target) claimed that in the future there would be just two types of company … those who had fully embraced services oriented architecture and those that were out of business … sold the executive team on the need to invest heavily in SOA Right Now! without doing more than a view-from-100,000 feet effort to connect the dots between SOA and actual external threats and opportunities.

“Big Data” is a big trend right now. It might represent a big opportunity for your company, if your business generates big data, and if analyzing it well can provide a competitive advantage (or prevent a competitive disadvantage).

Or it might not. Your business might not generate that much data. Or, if it does generate it, there might not be anything to learn from it that matters very much.

Or, for that matter, the executive team might not have a culture of honest inquiry, at which point no evidence or analysis will make any difference, because they don’t trust evidence and analysis anyway — they only trust their guts.

And that … what will actually work in the company as it is … is something else technology leaders need to factor in when deciding what to bring to the company’s attention.